Ansible Mastery: Complete Guide to Infrastructure Automation

Learn to implement automated software deployment with Ansible by building inventories, playbooks, modules, variables, loops, and roles. Gain practical knowledge on single-click deployments, testing, and best practices for configuration management.

Explore an Ansible case study that converts manual deployments to an automated, single-click process. Build and deploy updates to two NodeJS-based application servers using playbooks and variables.

Launch four AWS instances for a lab: an Ansible server, two app servers, and an nginx server; configure security groups, create a key pair, and connect via SSH.

Discover how Ansible inventory defines hosts and groups, and how to configure inventory and ansible.cfg for automation. Learn to manage private key files, declare a control machine, and verify connectivity.

Create four Ansible playbooks to install app servers, deploy across two hosts, and configure nginx, using a deployment directory with index.js and package.json from Git.

Learn to craft an ansible playbook for app servers installations, including yaml naming, inventory grouping, become usage, apt updates, nodejs ppa setup, express and pm2 installation, and directory creation.

Create and deploy app server one with a deployment yaml. Stop and restart pm2, back up index.js, and sync build files via scp with npm initialization.

Continue app server deployment by creating app server two deployment.yaml, stopping pm2 with ignore errors, starting again, backing up index.js, and validating API endpoints before nginx deployment.

Learn how Ansible modules such as copy, shell, apt, file, and lineinfile drive playbooks, modify remote files, restart services, and automate app endpoint updates.

Explore ansible variables in playbooks and YAML files, replacing hardcoded values with dynamic dictionary-based inputs using double curly braces, and understand practical examples with URL, directory name, and 0755 permissions.

Apply conditionals and loops in Ansible playbooks to install tools across multiple servers, using with_items and item variables, with when clauses to handle Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, and major version.

Learn how Ansible Galaxy enables discovering, installing, and managing roles through a community website and command line, and implement single click deployment for optimized playbooks.

Learn how Ansible roles break a playbook into multiple files and enable a single click deployment with app one deployment, app two deployment, and nginx deployment roles.

Create a single click deployment by consolidating three deployment files into a site deployment YAML, and run with Ansible to deploy app server and nginx with dry-run and live verification.

Discover how Ansible enables IT automation, configuration management, and provisioning using yaml playbooks. Explore its agentless, push architecture with ssh, inventory, and a central master server.

Set up a virtual lab by installing Oracle VirtualBox, creating an Ubuntu master server and a remote Ubuntu machine, then allocate memory and use dynamic 30 GB VDI disks.

Clone a master virtual machine using a full clone to create an exact remote server, then configure networking and install Ansible Python to begin our Ansible labs.

Rename the Ubuntu machines to master and slave, enable SSH for Ansible commands, and configure VirtualBox with bridged and host-only adapters and manual IP 192.168.56.1.

Rename hosts and assign static ip addresses for master and slave on a host-only network. Verify connectivity via reboot and ping to prepare for Ansible installation.

Map IP addresses to machine names in the host file to enable using names like slave instead of hard-coding IPs, enabling scalable connectivity across many machines.

Update the master and slave, install ansible on the master, set up ssh on the slave with port 22, and install python to enable ansible automation, then verify versions.

Learn to set up passwordless ssh by generating an ssh key pair, copying the public key to the slave, and testing password-free access for Ansible automation.

Explore configuring Ansible with ansible.cfg and the hosts inventory, including groupings like web servers, databases, and slaves for multi-host automation and remote settings such as port 22 and timeout 10s.

Run the first Ansible command to ping the slave group via the inventory, then create a YAML playbook that instructs commands on the slave and explains YAML basics.

Master YAML basics for writing playbooks in YAML language, recognizing YAML as a human readable, case sensitive, spaces sensitive data format that uses the .yaml extension and triple dashes.

Learn to write and run your first Ansible playbook in yaml, defining a slave host, a test connection task using ping, and executing via ansible-playbook with or without a path.

Explore the official Ansible documentation, covering installation, playbooks, inventory, modules, and ssh configuration, and learn to contribute to the open source project with YAML basics.

Explore Ansible modules as ready-made libraries you can leverage to write simpler playbooks for EC2, Docker, and network tasks, including Docker image module using the Docker API and Python SDK.

Create a file with an Ansible playbook by using a touch task and idempotence checks, validating file existence on the home/user directory across all hosts.

Learn how to use an ansible playbook to create multiple files with a placeholder loop, using touch with item, targeting a slave machine, and verify changes.

Learn how to gather system facts with Ansible, inspect key details like distribution and architecture, and apply conditions in playbooks to run tasks only when targets meet criteria.

Master three Ansible variable types—dictionary, list, and unsafe text—using examples like ansible_cmd_line and ansible_facts, and verify types with a debug playbook.

Explore how Ansible treats variables as dictionaries or lists by inspecting Ansible cmd line and Ansible facts in a playbook, using grep and specific commands to reveal types.

Learn to identify three Ansible variable types: dictionary with multiple keys and values, list with a single key and multiple values, and unsafe text with a single key-value pair.

Learn to use Ansible variables by registering a command output to a variable, then debug the Python version on the slave machine to drive conditional installations in a playbook.

Store variables in an external file and fetch them into Ansible playbooks using include_vars to manage hundreds of variables across projects.

Explore host-level and group-level variables in Ansible, assigning jenkins_port on individual hosts and applying the same port via group vars for production, with inventory ranges for scalable hosts.

Explore host-level and group-level variables in Ansible, set passwordless ssh on a non-standard port such as 9090, and use a custom hosts file with -i.

Define host-level variables in Ansible, replace external var includes, and print host-specific values like the python version from the host file; explore group-level variables next.

Master group variables in ansible by defining group level values and contrasting them with host level precedence, using playbooks, inventories, and production group scenarios.

Explore privilege escalation in Ansible playbooks by using become, become user, become method, and become flag to run as root, manage host permissions, and resolve password prompts.

Enable passwordless sudo and become root on the slave machine using the sudoers settings, so Ansible can install apache2 from the master playbook.

Attach handlers to tasks in a playbook to restart the SSH service after deploying a configuration file with the template module.

Define variables at host or group level and import modular playbooks into a master playbook to run tasks, enabling centralized management and easier maintenance.

This lecture shows how to import a task in Ansible instead of a playbook, using master.yml and a separate mysql.yml, and highlights yaml indentation, task naming, and common errors.

Learn how to protect sensitive data in Ansible vault for playbooks, including creating encrypted files, decrypting and encrypting data, and the rekey option.

Master the automated deployment of Magento 2 on Docker via Ansible playbooks, from provisioning AWS EC2 instances and passwordless SSH to writing YAML-based playbooks and validating container deployment.

Learn to deploy and configure Ansible on two Ubuntu EC2 instances, establishing a master and slave, and install Ansible from the official PPA with essential prerequisites.

Establish passwordless master–slave access via ssh keygen, place the key in the authorized key file, update the ansible host with the slave IP, and verify reachability by ping.

Implement an Ansible playbook in yaml to install Docker on the slave node and deploy Magento 2 in a Docker container, using apt tasks and Python prerequisites.

Continue implementing an Ansible playbook to install Docker, pull images, and launch linked MySQL and Magento 2 containers with environment variables on remote hosts.

Execute an Ansible playbook to deploy Magento 2 on Docker, launching MySQL and Magento containers linked together, and access the web portal via the slave node's public IP.