Working with Ansible Playbooks — Tips & Tricks with Examples

In this article, we are exploring Ansible Playbooks, which are basically blueprints for automation actions. Playbooks allow us to define a recipe with all the steps we would like to automate in a repeatable, simple, and consistent manner.

If you are entirely new to Ansible, check out this introductory Ansible Tutorial first.

What is an Ansible Playbook?

Playbooks are one of the basic components of Ansible as they record and execute Ansible’s configuration. Generally, a playbook is the primary way to automate a set of tasks that we would like to perform on a remote machine.

They help our automation efforts by gathering all the resources necessary to orchestrate ordered processes or avoid repeating manual actions. Playbooks can be reused and shared between persons, and they are designed to be human-friendly and easy to write in YAML.

Playbook Structure

A playbook is composed of one or more plays to run in a specific order. A play is an ordered list of tasks to run against the desired group of hosts.

Every task is associated with a module responsible for an action and its configuration parameters. Since most tasks are idempotent, we can safely rerun a playbook…