In this chapter, we will be installing Ansible, so you will need a machine capable of running it. I will go into more details about these requirements in the next part of the chapter. We will also be using Vagrant to launch a virtual machine locally. There is a section that walks through installing Vagrant as well as downloading a CentOS 7 Vagrant box, which is around 400 MB.

You can find complete versions of all of the playbooks in the GitHub repository that accompanies this book at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Learn-Ansible/tree/master/Chapter02.

Let's dive straight in and install Ansible. Throughout this book, I will be assuming that you are running a macOS host machine running macOS High Sierra or a Linux machine with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS installed. While we will cover running Ansible on Windows 10 Professional using the Linux subsystem for Windows, using Windows as a host machine will not be supported in this book.

There are a few different ways you can install Ansible on your macOS High Sierra host machine. I will cover them both.

In order to launch a virtual machine to run our first set of Ansible commands against, we are going to use Vagrant.

To install Vagrant on macOS, we can use Homebrew along with cask. To install cask, run the following command:

$ brew install cask

By default, Vagrant uses VirtualBox. Once cask is installed, you can use VirtualBox and Vagrant by running the following command:

$ brew cask install virtualbox vagrant

To install on Ubuntu...

Normally in IT, a playbook is a set of instructions run by someone when something happens; a little vague, I know, but stay with me. These range from everything to building and configuring new server instances, to how to deploy code updates and how to deal with problems when they occur.

In the traditional sense, a playbook is typically a collection of scripts or instructions for a user to follow and, while they are meant to introduce consistency and conformity across systems, even with the best intentions, this is almost never the case.

This is where Ansible comes in. Using an Ansible playbook, you are basically saying apply these changes and commands against these sets of hosts rather than someone having to log in and start working their way through the runbook manually.

Before we run a playbook, let's discuss how we provide Ansible with a list...

In this chapter, we have taken our first steps with Ansible by installing locally and then, using Vagrant, launching a virtual machine to interact with. We learned about basic host inventory files and we used the Ansible command to execute a single task against our virtual machine.

We then looked at playbooks, starting out with a basic playbook that returned some information on our target before then progressing to a playbook that updates all of the installed operating system packages before installing and configuring the NTP service.

In the next chapter, we are going to take a look at other Ansible commands we can use.

1. What is the command to install Ansible using pip?
2. True or false: You can choose exactly which version of Ansible to install or roll back to when using Homebrew.
3. True or false: The Windows Subsystem for Linux runs in a virtual machine.
4. Name three hypervisors that are supported by Vagrant.
5. State and explain what a host inventory is.
6. True or false: Indentation in YAML files is extremely important to their execution and isn't just cosmetic.
7. Update the final playbook to install a service of your choice and have it notify a handler to start the service with its default configuration.

In this chapter, we used the following Ansible modules, and you can find out more information on each module in the following links:

• setup: http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/setup_module.html
• debug: http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/debug_module.html
• yum: http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/yum_module.html
• service: http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/service_module.html