Installation

Type the following apt-get command or apt command:
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade
$ sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
Next add ppa:ansible/ansible to your system’s Software Source:
$ sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ansible/ansible

Update your repos:
$ sudo apt-get update
Sample outputs:

To install the latest version of ansible, enter:

$ sudo apt-get install ansible

Type the following command:Finding out Ansible version

$ ansible –version
Sample outputs:

Creating your hosts file

Ansible needs to know your remote server names or IP address. This information is stored in a file called hosts. The default is /etc/ansible/hosts. You can edit this one or create a new one in your $HOME directory:
$ sudo vi /etc/ansible/hosts
Or
$ vi $HOME/hosts
Append your server’s DNS or IP address:

[webservers]

server1.nicktailor.com

192.168.0.21

192.168.0.25

[devservers]

192.168.0.22

192.168.0.23

192.168.0.24

I have two groups. The first one named as webserver and other is called devservers.

Setting up ssh keys

You must configure ssh keys between your machine and remote servers specified in ~/hosts file:
$ ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C “My ansisble key”
Use scp or ssh-copy-id command to copy your public key file (e.g., $HOME/.ssh/id_rsa.pub) to your account on the remote server/host:
$ ssh-copy-id -i $HOME/.ssh/id_rsa.pub root@server1.cyberciti.biz
$ ssh-copy-id -i $HOME/.ssh/id_rsa.pub root@192.168.0.22
$ ssh-copy-id -i $HOME/.ssh/id_rsa.pub root@192.168.0.23
$ ssh-copy-id -i $HOME/.ssh/id_rsa.pub root@192.168.0.24
$ eval $(ssh-agent)
$ ssh-add
Now ansible can talk to all remote servers using ssh command.

Send ping server to all servers

Just type the following command:
$ ansible -i ~/hosts -m ping all
Sample outputs:

192.168.0.22 | SUCCESS => {

“changed”: false,

“failed”: false,

“ping”: “pong”

}

192.168.0.23 | SUCCESS => {

“changed”: false,

“failed”: false,

“ping”: “pong”

}

192.168.0.24 | SUCCESS => {

“changed”: false,

“failed”: false,

“ping”: “pong”

}

Find out uptime for all hosts

$ ansible -i hosts -m shell -a ‘uptime’ all
Sample outputs:

Where,

1. -i ~/hosts: Specify inventory host path. You can setup shell variable and skip the -i option. For e.g.: export ANSIBLE_HOSTS=~/hosts
2. -m shell: Module name to execute such as shell, apt, yum and so on
3. -a ‘uptime’: Module arguments. For example, shell module will accept Unix/Linux command names. The apt module will accept options to update remote boxes using apt-get/apt command and so on.
4. all: The all means “all hosts.” You can speificy group name such as devservers (ansible -i hosts -m shell -a ‘uptime’ dbservers) or host names too.

Update all Debian/Ubuntu server using apt module

Run the following command:
$ ansible -i ~/hosts -m apt -a ‘update_cache=yes upgrade=dist’ dbservers

Writing your first playbook

You can combine all modules in a text file as follows in yml format i.e. create a file named update.yml:

—

– hosts: dbservers

tasks:

– name: Updating host using apt

apt:

update_cache: yes

                    upgrade: dist

Fig.01: Ansible playbook in actionNow you can run it as follows:
$ ansible-playbook -i ~/hosts update.yml