Ansible: Automate Servers with Playbooks

Learn agentless automation with Ansible: inventories, playbooks, variables, templates, handlers, roles, Vault and safe production rollouts, with real runnable examples.

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Syllabus

Ansible Basics

1. What Ansible Is
2. Installing and Your First Command
3. Inventory: Hosts and Groups
4. SSH, Become and ansible.cfg

Playbooks

1. Anatomy of a Playbook
2. Running a Playbook and Reading the Output
3. Idempotency
4. Check Mode and Diff

Variables, Facts and Templates

1. Variables and Precedence
2. Facts About Hosts
3. Jinja2 Templates
4. group_vars and host_vars

Control Flow

1. Loops and Conditionals
2. Handlers: Act Only on Change
3. register, Tags and Blocks

Roles and Reuse

1. Role Structure
2. Collections and Ansible Galaxy
3. Including and Importing Tasks

Security and Secrets

1. Ansible Vault
2. Least Privilege and no_log
3. Safe Automation Practices

Production Practices

1. Linting and Testing
2. Environments and Dynamic Inventory
3. Rolling Updates, Speed and Controllers

Putting It Together

1. Case Study: Deploying a Web App Across Environments
2. Revision: Cheat Sheet and Self-Check