This is a follow-up to my getting-started-with-Ansible post, in which I walk through writing my first playbook that installs NGINX and keeps the service running on a pair of web servers. I cover the basics of YAML, the shift to declarative thinking, the apt and service modules, and how to read the color-coded output from a playbook run. I close by setting up a problem for a future post: automating updates across servers that each have unique credentials...
My beginner’s guide to taking the first steps with Ansible, aimed at people comfortable managing a few Linux servers on homelab VMs or a VPS rather than following tutorials built around Vagrant and VirtualBox. I cover installation prerequisites, ad-hoc commands run against a small set of Debian VMs, core concepts like modules and idempotence, and simplifying commands with inventory files and ansible.cfg. I defer playbooks to a follow-up...
