Ansible

Ansible is a radically simple deployment, configuration, and command execution framework. Other tools in this space have been too complicated for too long, require too much bootstrapping, and have too much learning curve. Ansible is dead simple and painless to extend. For comparison, Puppet and Chef have about 60k lines of code. Ansible’s core is a little over 1000 lines.

Ansible isn’t just for configuration – it’s also great for Ad-Hoc tasks, quickly firing off commands against nodes. Where Ansible excels though, is expressing complex multi-node deployment processes, executing complex sequences of commands on different hosts through “playbooks”.

Extending ansible does not require programming in any particular language – you can write modules as scripts or programs that return simple JSON. It’s also trivially easy to just execute useful shell commands.

Why use Ansible versus something else? (Puppet, Chef, Fabric, Capistrano, mCollective, Func, SaltStack, etc?) Ansible will have far less code, it will be (by extension) more correct, and it will be the easiest thing to hack on and use you’ll ever see – regardless of your favorite language of choice.

Systems management doesn’t have to be complicated. Ansible’s docs will remain short & simple, and the source will be blindingly obvious.

Design Goals

• Dead simple setup
• Super fast & parallel by default
• No server or client daemons; use existing SSHd out of the box
• No additional software required on client boxes
• Modules can be written in ANY language
• Awesome API for creating very powerful distributed scripts
• Be very usable as non-root
• Create the easiest config management system to use, ever.

Communicate and Get Involved

Your ideas and contributions are welcome. We’re also happy to help you with questions about Ansible.

• Join the ansible-project mailing list on Google Groups
• Join #ansible on the freenode IRC network
• Visit the project page on Github
  • View the issue tracker

Contents

• Getting Started
  • Requirements
  • Developer Requirements
  • Getting Ansible
    • Python Distutils
    • Via RPM
  • Your first commands
• The Inventory File, Patterns, and Groups
  • Inventory File Format
  • Selecting Targets
• Examples
  • Parallelism and Shell Commands
  • Time Limited Background Operations
  • File Transfer & Templating
  • Deploying From Source Control
  • Managing Services
• Ansible Modules
  • command
  • copy
  • facter
  • git
  • ohai
  • ping
  • service
  • setup
  • template
  • Writing your own modules
• YAML Format
  • YAML Basics
• Playbooks: Ansible for Deployment, Configuration Management, and Orchestration
  • Playbook Example
  • Hosts line
  • Vars section
  • Tasks list
  • Task name and action
  • Notify statements
  • Handlers
  • Includes
  • Asynchronous Actions and Polling
  • Executing A Playbook
• API
• Man Pages
  • ansible(1)

About the Author

Ansible was originally developed by Michael DeHaan, a Raleigh, NC based software developer and architect. He created other popular DevOps programs such as Cobbler, the popular Linux install server. Cobbler is used to deploy mission critical systems all over the planet, in industries ranging from massively multiplayer gaming, core internet infrastructure, finance, chip design, and more. Michael also helped co-author of Func, a precursor to Ansible, which is used to orchestrate systems in lots of diverse places. He’s worked on systems software for IBM, Motorola, Red Hat’s Emerging Technologies Group, Puppet Labs, and rPath.