44 Ansible Best Practices to Follow [Tips & Tricks]

Ansible is one of the most used open-source software tools for configuration management, software provisioning, and application deployment of cloud or on-premises environments. This article will look into best practices for setting up Ansible projects and suggest approaches to deal with Ansible’s internals effectively.

If you are new to Ansible, take a look at this Ansible Tutorial for Beginners.

1. Generic & Project Structure Best Practices

In this part, we will examine and discuss general best practices and recommendations for organizing your projects and getting the most out of Ansible.

Generic Best Practices

Prefer YAML instead of JSON: Although Ansible allows JSON syntax, using YAML is preferred and improves the readability of files and projects.

Use consistent whitespaces: To separate things nicely and improve readability, consider leaving a blank line between blocks, tasks, or other components.

Use a consistent tagging strategy: Tagging is a powerful concept in Ansible since it allows us to group and manage tasks more granularly. Tags provide us with the option to add fine-grained controls to the execution of tasks.