Working with the local_action feature
The local_action feature of Ansible is a powerful one, especially when we think of Orchestration. This feature allows you to run certain tasks locally on the machine that runs Ansible.
Consider the following situations:
- Spawning a new machine or creating a JIRA ticket
- Managing your command center(s) in terms of installing packages and setting up configurations
- Calling a load balancer API to disable a certain web server entry from the load balancer
These are tasks that can be run on the same machine that runs the ansible-playbook command rather than logging in to a remote box and running these commands.
Let's look at an example. Suppose you want to run a shell module on your local system where you are running your Ansible playbook. The local_action option comes into the picture in such situations. If you pass the module name and the module argument to local_action, it will run that module locally. Let's see how this option works with the shell module...
