Summary

In this chapter, you learned that it is possible to define specifically how Ansible perceives a failure or a change when a specific task is run, how to use blocks to gracefully handle errors and perform cleanup, and how to write tight, efficient code using loops.

As a result, you should now be able to alter any given task to provide specific conditions under which Ansible will fail it or consider a change successful. This is incredibly valuable when running shell commands, as we have demonstrated in this chapter, and also serves when defining specialized use cases for existing modules. You should also now be able to organize your Ansible tasks into blocks, ensuring that if failures do occur, recovery actions can be taken that would otherwise not need to be run. Finally, you should now be able to write tight, efficient Ansible playbooks using loops, removing the need for repetitive code and lengthy, inefficient playbooks.

In the next chapter, we'll explore...