The PHP5-FPM role

In PHP5-FPM, FPM stands for FastCGI Process Manager. PHP5-FPM comes with advanced features over fastcgi, which are useful for managing high-traffic sites. It is suitable for serving our fifanews site, which is expected to get a few million hits a day. Following our design tenet of creating a modular code, we would keep PHP functionality in its own role. Let's initialize the PHP5-FPM role using the Ansible-Galaxy command, as follows:

$ ansible-galaxy init --init-path roles/ php5-fpm

Defining an array

PHP installation will involve the installation of multiple packages, including php5-fpm, php5-mysql, and a few others. So far, we have been writing tasks one at a time. For example, let's take a look at the following code snippet:

  - name: install php5-fpm
    apt: name: "php5-fpm" 
  - name: install php5-mysql
    apt: name: "php5-mysql"

However, this could become repetitive when we want to install multiple packages, also causing redundant code....