Ansible Playbooks offer a repeatable, re-usable, simple configuration management and multi-machine deployment system, one that is well suited to deploying complex applications. If you need to execute a task with Ansible more than once, write a playbook and put it under source control. Then you can use the playbook to push out new configuration or confirm the configuration of remote systems. The playbooks in the `ansible-examples repository <https://github.com/ansible/ansible-examples>`_ illustrate many useful techniques. You may want to look at these in another tab as you read the documentation.
Playbooks are expressed in YAML format with a minimum of syntax. If you are not familiar with YAML, look at our overview of :ref:`yaml_syntax` and consider installing an add-on for your text editor (see :ref:`other_tools_and_programs`) to help you write clean YAML syntax in your playbooks.
A playbook is composed of one or more 'plays' in an ordered list. The terms 'playbook' and 'play' are sports analogies. Each play executes part of the overall goal of the playbook, running one or more tasks. Each task calls an Ansible module.
A playbook runs in order from top to bottom. Within each play, tasks also run in order from top to bottom. Playbooks with multiple 'plays' can orchestrate multi-machine deployments, running one play on your webservers, then another play on your database servers, then a third play on your network infrastructure, and so on. At a minimum, each play defines two things:
Your playbook can include more than just a hosts line and tasks. For example, the playbook above sets a ``remote_user`` for each play. This is the user account for the SSH connection. You can add other :ref:`playbook_keywords` at the playbook, play, or task level to influence how Ansible behaves. Playbook keywords can control the :ref:`connection plugin <connection_plugins>`, whether to use :ref:`privilege escalation <become>`, how to handle errors, and more. To support a variety of environments, Ansible lets you set many of these parameters as command-line flags, in your Ansible configuration, or in your inventory. Learning the :ref:`precedence rules <general_precedence_rules>` for these sources of data will help you as you expand your Ansible ecosystem.
By default, Ansible executes each task in order, one at a time, against all machines matched by the host pattern. Each task executes a module with specific arguments. When a task has executed on all target machines, Ansible moves on to the next task. You can use :ref:`strategies <playbooks_strategies>` to change this default behavior. Within each play, Ansible applies the same task directives to all hosts. If a task fails on a host, Ansible takes that host out of the rotation for the rest of the playbook.
When you run a playbook, Ansible returns information about connections, the ``name`` lines of all your plays and tasks, whether each task has succeeded or failed on each machine, and whether each task has made a change on each machine. At the bottom of the playbook execution, Ansible provides a summary of the nodes that were targeted and how they performed. General failures and fatal "unreachable" communication attempts are kept separate in the counts.
Most Ansible modules check whether the desired final state has already been achieved, and exit without performing any actions if that state has been achieved, so that repeating the task does not change the final state. Modules that behave this way are often called 'idempotent.' Whether you run a playbook once, or multiple times, the outcome should be the same. However, not all playbooks and not all modules behave this way. If you are unsure, test your playbooks in a sandbox environment before running them multiple times in production.
Sometimes you want a task to run only when a change is made on a machine. For example, you may want to restart a service if a task updates the configuration of that service, but not if the configuration is unchanged. Ansible uses handlers to address this use case. Handlers are tasks that only run when notified. Each handler should have a globally unique name.
By default, handlers run after all the tasks in a particular play have been completed. This approach is efficient, because the handler only runs once, regardless of how many tasks notify it. For example, if multiple tasks update a configuration file and notify a handler to restart Apache, Ansible only bounces Apache once to avoid unnecessary restarts.
If you need handlers to run before the end of the play, add a task to flush them using the :ref:`meta module <meta_module>`, which executes Ansible actions::
You may want your Ansible handlers to use variables. For example, if the name of a service varies slightly by distribution, you want your output to show the exact name of the restarted service for each target machine. Avoid placing variables in the name of the handler. Since handler names are templated early on, Ansible may not have a value available for a handler name like this::
handlers:
# this handler name may cause your play to fail!
- name: restart "{{ web_service_name }}"
If the variable used in the handler name is not available, the entire play fails. Changing that variable mid-play **will not** result in newly created handler.
Instead, place variables in the task parameters of your handler. You can load the values using ``include_vars`` like this:
* Handlers always run in the order they are defined, not in the order listed in the notify-statement. This is also the case for handlers using `listen`.
* Use unique handler names. If you trigger more than one handler with the same name, the first one(s) get overwritten. Only the last one defined will run.
* handlers notified within ``pre_tasks``, ``tasks``, and ``post_tasks`` sections are automatically flushed in the end of section where they were notified.
* handlers notified within ``roles`` section are automatically flushed in the end of ``tasks`` section, but before any ``tasks`` handlers.
There's also a `clever playbook <https://github.com/ansible/ansible-examples/blob/master/language_features/ansible_pull.yml>`_ available to configure ``ansible-pull`` via a crontab from push mode.
You may want to verify your playbooks to catch syntax errors and other problems before you run them. The :ref:`ansible-playbook` command offers several options for verification, including ``--check``, ``--diff``, ``--list-hosts``, ``list-tasks``, and ``--syntax-check``. The :ref:`validate-playbook-tools` describes other tools for validating and testing playbooks.
You can use `ansible-lint <https://docs.ansible.com/ansible-lint/index.html>`_ for detailed, Ansible-specific feedback on your playbooks before you execute them. For example, if you run ``ansible-lint`` on the playbook called ``verify-apache.yml`` near the top of this page, you should get the following results:
Task/Handler: ensure apache is at the latest version
The `ansible-lint default rules <https://docs.ansible.com/ansible-lint/rules/default_rules.html>`_ page describes each error. For ``[403]``, the recommended fix is to change ``state: latest`` to ``state: present`` in the playbook.
