An introduction to playbooks

Typically, 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 building and configuring new server instances to deploying code updates and dealing 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 seldom the case.

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

Before we run a playbook, let’s discuss how we provide Ansible with a list of hosts to target. To do this, we will be using the ansible.builtin.setup module. This connects to a host and then fetches as much...