Chapter 2. Automating Simple Tasks
As we have mentioned in the previous chapter, Ansible can be used for both, creating and managing a whole infrastructure, as well as be integrated into an infrastructure that is already working.
In this chapter, we will see:
- What a playbook is and how it works
- How to create a web server using Ansible
- A close look at the Jinja2 template engine
But first we will talk about YAML Ain't Markup Language (YAML), a human-readable data serialization language that is widely used in Ansible.
YAML
YAML, like many other data serialization languages (such as JSON), has very few, basic concepts:
- Declarations
- Lists
- Associative arrays
A declaration is very similar to a variable in any other language, that is:
name: 'This is the name'
To ...
Get Learning Ansible 2 - Second Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
