Automating Server Configs with Ansible

Ansible is an open-source automation tool, or platform, used for IT tasks such as configuration management, application deployment, intraservice orchestration, and provisioning.

Your First Playbook

Here is a simple playbook to install Apache on a Debian-based system:

---
- hosts: webservers
  become: true
  tasks:
    - name: Ensure Apache is at the latest version
      apt:
        name: apache2
        state: latest

    - name: Ensure Apache is running
      service:
        name: apache2
        state: started
        enabled: yes

Inventory

Simplicity is key.

[webservers]
192.168.1.50
192.168.1.51

Running this ansible-playbook -i inventory site.yml will configure all your servers at once.