How to Use Blocks in Ansible Playbooks

Ansible has become one of the most popular tools for managing cloud and on-premises infrastructure. With Ansible, IT professionals can automate processes and perform configuration management tasks to ensure consistency and best practices in their systems.

This blog explores Ansible blocks, a way to group tasks in Ansible playbooks.

What are blocks in Ansible?

Ansible blocks are a way to logically group and split tasks in Ansible playbooks. By grouping multiple tasks together using blocks, you can apply common attributes, error handling, or conditional statements and can set data or directives to various tasks simultaneously.

When to use Ansible blocks:

• Organization — Blocks help with playbook organization and ensure code duplication and standard behavior across tasks.
• Conditional execution — Attributes or directives set at the Ansible block level aren’t applied directly to the block itself but are inherited by and applied to each task in the block. Examples include conditionals such as when, block variables, or privilege escalation such as become.
• Debugging — Blocks also help with error handling with the rescue keyword. You can define a rescue section to run specific tasks when an error occurs within the…