Can you explain the concept of playbooks in Ansible?

Playbooks are Ansible’s configuration, deployment, and orchestration language. They can describe a policy you want your remote systems to enforce, or a set of steps in a general IT process. Playbooks are designed to be human-readable and are developed in a basic text language.

Playbooks are expressed in YAML format and have a minimum of syntax, which intentionally tries to not be a programming language or script, but rather a model of a configuration or a process.

Example:


– hosts: webservers
remote_user: root
tasks:
– name: Install httpd
yum:
name: httpd
state: present
– name: Ensure httpd is running
service:
name: httpd
state: started
enabled: yes

What is the purpose of Ansible Playbooks?

Ansible Playbooks are YAML files that contain instructions for Ansible to follow. They are used to define the tasks that Ansible should execute on a set of hosts. Playbooks can be used to manage configurations, deploy applications, and automate complex multi-tier IT workflows.

Example:


– hosts: webservers
tasks:
– name: Install Apache
apt: name=apache2 state=present
– name: Start Apache
service: name=apache2 state=started