Ansible Essentials with Hands-on Labs

Name: Ansible Essentials with Hands-on Labs
Rating: 4.5 (671 reviews)

Learn Ansible for DevOps & Automation. Start from the basics and go all the way to creating your own playbooks & roles!

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Created byUgur Oktay

Last updated 1/2024

English

English [Auto],French [Auto],

What you'll learn

Configuration management with Ansible
Install and configure Ansible Automation Engine on a control node
Run ad-hoc automation tasks from the command line
Write Ansible playbooks to automate multiple system administration tasks on managed hosts
Work with Ansible in conjunction with Vagrant and Virtualbox in a DevOps environment
Parameterize Ansible playbooks using variables and facts
Ansible variable precedence system and overriding
Use Jinja2 templating to enable dynamic expressions and access to variables
Create Ansible playbooks/roles to deploy a 3-tier web application
Configure Ansible roles with tasks, handlers, files, templates, dependencies and variables
Be able to create Ansible playbooks/roles to deploy a 3-tier web application

Course content

6 sections • 58 lectures • 6h 43m total length

Introduction to Ansible Essentials Course4:33
Learn the essentials of ansible through hands-on labs, starting with basics and advancing to playbooks, ad hoc commands, and deploying a fully functional multi-node lamp stack for configuration management.
Course Overview5:51
Explore the course overview and lab setup for Ansible essentials, including a five-VM lab topology with Vagrant or Docker and a complete LAMP stack deployment.
Important, please read!1:12

Ansible Architecture4:58
Get to know Ansible's key components such as Ansible Controller, playbooks, modules, tasks etc.
Course FAQ0:36
Continually updated Text Document with Course FAQs.
Installing Ansible4:06
Learn about the multiple methods to install Ansible. Install latest version of Ansible on a controller machine.
Ansible Inventory11:27
Learn about the Ansible inventory file. Create and customize an inventory file for deploying a 3-tier web application with Ansible.
Ansible Configuration File (ansible.cfg)6:58
Get familiar with the Ansible configuration file. Learn how to customize and use it in a multi-project environment.
Ansible Basics

YAML Overview5:36
Explore Ansible playbooks and YAML basics, including ad hoc tasks, handlers, loops, conditionals, variables, facts, and Jinja templating, while reviewing mappings, lists, dictionaries, quotes, and indentation.
Ansible Playbook Structure8:17
Tasks & Idempotency in Ansible6:06
Execute tasks in Ansible playbooks by calling modules to perform a unit of work on matched hosts, ensuring idempotency and item potency so repeated runs reach the desired state.
YAML & Ansible Playbook Structure
First Ansible Playbook3:43
Syntax Check & Dry Run4:42
Anaible Playbook Execution11:45
Host Facts12:03
Learn how the ansible setup module gathers facts about remote hosts and supports OS-family based decisions. Apply these facts to choose the right package manager and Apache package in playbooks.
Yum Module8:46
Service Module4:43
Start the Apache service with Ansible's service module by setting name and state to started. Enable it to boot automatically and verify it runs.
Copy Module6:08
Use Ansible's copy module to deploy files to remote hosts with owner, group, and mode; leverage content or source files, backups, and idempotent updates for an Apache site.
Loops in Ansible8:55
Master using loops in ansible to copy multiple files with a single task, and adopt best practices for package management with yum or apt and php installation.
Variables-I4:07
Variables-II5:04
Learn the basics of ansible variables: naming rules, types like integers, booleans, lists, and dictionaries; declare and reference variables in playbooks with double braces, and loop over lists and dictionaries.
Variables-III11:55
Variable Precedence in Ansible10:15
Lineinfile Module14:26
Develop and deploy an Ansible playbook using the lineinfile module to populate the /etc/hosts file across all lab VMs, enabling name resolution and smooth testing.
Apache Virtual Host Configuration8:33
Ansible Handlers8:56
Error Handling-I4:21
Error Handling-II: Register & When7:37
Learn to detect failures and continue playbooks by registering task results and using when conditions to revert bad configurations, debug messages, and remove invalid files so Apache restarts are safe.
Error Handling-III: Ignore Errors5:22
Blocks5:27
Git Module3:23
Templating I: Loops & Conditionals11:04
Templating II- Filters & Tests5:26
Templating III: HAProxy Configuration6:41
Templating IV: HAProxy Configuration7:28
Templating V: HAProxy Configuration7:30
Mysql_db & mysql_user9:00
Common Tasks6:25
Firewalld Module3:42
Configure the firewalld module to allow port 80 and port 3306 across web servers, load balancer, and database, with curl tests and RAM considerations.
Tags5:18
Explore how Ansible tags target specific tasks and blocks, run or skip tagged content, and use tag inheritance with list tasks and list tags to manage lamp stack playbooks.

Including & Importing11:05
Learn to modularize Ansible playbooks with includes, imports, and roles to create reusable task files. Compare static and dynamic behaviors and apply the dry principle.
Site.yml3:14
Ansible Roles3:58
Organize playbooks with ansible roles, a predefined directory structure, and a framework for variables, tasks, files, templates, and modules. Call roles within a play; they cannot be executed directly.
Role Structure2:39
Discover the standard yaml-based Ansible role structure, with eight directories, and learn to create roles manually or via the ansible galaxy tool, preparing a web role for Apache installation.
Tasks & Handlers7:21
Files & Templates5:23
Role Variables: Defaults & Vars6:45
Explore how to define and manage role variables in Ansible, comparing defaults and vars, understanding precedence, using namespace best practices, and migrating variables into role definitions.
Meta & Tests6:36
Define and explore the meta/main.yml to manage Galaxy info and role dependencies, and observe how dependent roles run before the main web role in a test playbook.
Role Execution8:38

About Vagrant and Lab Environment5:39
Vagrant Installation4:59
Install and configure vagrant on your local machine using virtual box as the hypervisor. Set up a lab environment and verify the installation for hands-on practice.
Environment Setup24:32
This is the Vagrantfile I have used to set up the lab environment. It requires a little customization like folders etc and also you should remove the '.txt' file extension before running "vagrant init" command.
Creating a non-root user for Ansible6:58
Setting up SSH Authentication11:38

Requirements

Familiarity with Linux administration concepts

Description

Ansible is a simple to understand, simple to adopt, simple to use IT configuration management and automation tool. With the Ansible Essentials course, you can start from the basics and go all the way to creating your own playbooks and roles with Ansible.

This is a focused course designed to rapidly get you up to speed on using Ansible automation engine in real life. As an IT professional, you'll develop a solid understanding of Ansible and will be able to apply it to daily automation and configuration management tasks.

Ansible Essentials course includes lots of examples and hands-on labs and aims at providing students with first-hand experience with course concepts. You can follow along the course by setting up your own lab environment. A Vagrant environment is used throughout the course, and in the appendix, you'll find detailed lectures showing you how to set up one for yourself.

Each lecture introduces a new Ansible concept. Concepts are first explained, and then relevant examples are provided. Some of them are also demoed in the lab environment showing you how they can be applied to playbooks. And finally, we apply the concept to our LAMP Stack playbooks.

Course follows a progressive path that mirrors a real-world approach to automation. It's divided into five sections, starting with the architectural overview and foundational concepts. In section 2, we'll install Ansible automation engine and learn about inventory, which is the first thing we need to get started automating tasks with Ansible. We'll learn ad-hoc commands and also discover some of Ansible's commonly used modules in section 3.

Then we'll move on to ansible playbooks. Playbooks let us use fully-fledged configuration management and orchestration capabilities of Ansible. Ansible playbooks are written in YAML, so before diving into the details of playbooks, we'll do a YAML overview. Then, we'll learn about playbook basics, including playbook structure, idempotency, and tasks. We'll learn how to run a playbook, check its syntax, and control its output with verbose.

Then we'll start building our 3 tier web application. In each lecture, we'll learn one or more ansible features, and we'll apply them to our project. In this part of the course, you'll learn about handlers, Jinja2 templating, loops, variables, error handling, and much more. At the end of this section, you'll have prepared playbooks that can deploy a fully functional multi-node LAMP stack on your machines.

In section 5, we'll cover how to organize playbooks more effectively where you'll learn about imports, includes, and roles. We'll refactor the playbooks into roles and make them easy to share and reuse.

This course is based on Red Hat® Ansible Engine 2.8 and CentOS Linux 7.7. By following along the course, you'll learn how to set up a 3-tiered web application environment that leverages Apache2, Python, and MySQL on CentOS machines.

Who this course is for:

Complete beginners to Ansible and configuration management
IT professionals who are experienced in another configuration management tool and now want to pick up a new skill
IT professionals who know basic Ansible but now want to level up their skills with the advanced topics in this course

Ansible Essentials with Hands-on Labs

What you'll learn

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Course content

Introduction3 lectures • 12min

Ansible Foundations & Installation5 lectures • 28min

Ansible Ad-Hoc Commands4 lectures • 22min

Ansible Playbooks32 lectures • 3hr 53min

Creating Reusable Playbooks9 lectures • 56min

Appendix- Environment Setup5 lectures • 54min

Requirements

Description

Who this course is for: