Chapter 4. Bringing In Your Code – Custom Commands and Scripts

Ansible comes with a wide variety of built-in modules that allow us to manage various system components, for example, users, packages, network, files, and services. Ansible's battery-included approach also provides the ability to integrate the components with cloud platforms, databases, and applications such as Jira, Apache, IRC, and Nagios, and so on. However, every now and then, we would find ourselves in a position where we may not find a module that exactly does the job for us. For example, installing a package from source involves downloading it, extracting a source tarball, followed by the make command, and finally, "make install". There is no single module that does this. There will also be times when we would like to bring in our existing scripts that we have spent nights creating and just have them invoked or scheduled with Ansible, for example, nightly backup scripts. Ansible's...