Ansible Playbooks

An Ansible Playbook is a configuration file used by Ansible. You can think of it as a Vagrantfile for Vagrant. It uses the YAML (Yet Another Markup Language) markup language as the syntax and is easily readable:

---
 - hosts: all
     sudo: yes
     tasks:
         - name: ensure nginx is at the latest version
             apt: name=nginx state=latest
         - name: start nginx
             service:
                 name: nginx
                 state: started

Let's look at the example playbook we created in the previous section, shown here in the above code block, and dissect it to get a better understanding of what it all means:

• The first line is always three dashes to signify the beginning of the file.
• We must then define which hosts this applies to. These can often be defined in the Ansible inventory file by setting a value such as [db] and supplying an IP address for that node.
• We then set the sudo value to yes as we require sudo/root privileges to install Nginx on the...