Ansible tasks and modules

Ansible tasks form the basic building block of running Ansible commands. Ansible tasks are structured in the following format:

$ ansible <options> <inventory>

Ansible modules are a reusable unit of code that does a particular thing very well, such as running a shell command, and creating and managing users. You can use Ansible modules with Ansible tasks to manage the configuration within the managed nodes. For example, the following command will run the uname command on each server we are managing:

$ ansible -m shell -a "uname" all
db | CHANGED | rc=0 >>
Linux
web | CHANGED | rc=0 >>
Linux

So we get a reply from the db server and the web server, each providing a return code, 0, and an output, Linux. If you look at the command, you will see that we have provided the following flags:

• -m: The name of the module (shell module here)
• -a: The parameters to the module (uname in this case)

The command...