DevOps Classroom notes 05/Feb/2026

Ansible Playbooks

• Ansible Playbook is a declarative way of expressing the tasks to be done on the nodes.
• It is expressed in yaml
• Playbook is collect of play’s
• Each Play will have
  • hosts: where to execute
  • tasks: Each task is achieved by module
  • roles:
  • become: this applies to play or task which means do we need sudo
• Structure of Ansible playbook: Create a yaml file

---
- name: <play-1>
  hosts: <where to execute>
  become: yes|no
  tasks:
    - name: <task 1>
      <module>:
        param-1: <value-1>
        ..
        param-n: <value-n>
- name: <play-2>
  hosts: <where to execute>
  become: yes|no
  tasks:
    - name: <task 1>
      <module>:
        param-1: <value-1>
        ..
        param-n: <value-n>
...
- name: <play-n>
  hosts: <where to execute>
  become: yes|no
  tasks:
    - name: <task 1>
      <module>:
        param-1: <value-1>
        ..
        param-n: <value-n>

Lets create a playbook for deploying the website

• installing nginx
• create a playbook called website.yaml and hosts file Refer Here for the changes done
• Now lets look at ansible-playbook

ansible-playbook --help

• Lets do syntax check

ansible-playbook --syntax-check -i hosts website.yaml

• Lets execute the dry run: Which approximately tells you what would happen when you execute the playbook without installing/configuring on node.
• note: dry run might not work in all cases

ansible-playbook --check -i hosts website.yaml

• Now lets execute the playbook

ansible-playbook -i hosts website.yaml

• When we execute ansible playbook we get a status at end of every task
  • ok (everything is done already)
  • changed (ansible executed to meet what you want)
    
• It is not necessary to write a task per step, in some case we can combine Refer Here
• Refer Here for the changes to download website
• Exercise: With my current playbook to access website i have to access http://publicip/templatemo_589_lugx_gaming/, but i want to access on http://publicip