Chapter 4. Using Ansible
Ansible is another provisioning tool supported by Vagrant that makes it easy for us to take a base operating system installation and turn it into a full-fledged server that suits the needs of our project.
In this chapter, we will quickly take a look at the basics of Ansible. We won't look at it within a Vagrant context just yet; we will simply take a look at how Ansible works, and how we can use it. In Chapter 6, Provisioning Vagrant Machines with Puppet, Ansible, and Chef, we will take a look at how to connect what we will learn in this chapter with Vagrant itself. In this chapter, we will learn the following topics:
- How Ansible works
- How to use Ansible to perform the following tasks:
- Installing software
- Managing files and folders within the filesystem
- Managing cron jobs
- Running commands
- Managing users and groups
- How to use third-party Ansible roles
- How to manually run Ansible to provision a machine
Ansible itself is a large topic and subject of several books...
