ansible-playbook \- format and function of an ansible playbook file
.SH"DESCRIPTION"
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Ansible ships with a ansible\-playbook tool for running playbooks\&. Playbooks can represent frequent tasks, desired system configurations, or deployment processes\&.
.SH"FORMAT"
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Playbooks are currently writeable in YAML\&. Other formats (JSON?) may be supported in the future\&.
For all hosts in /etc/ansible/hosts (one host per line) that are named \fIwebserver\-anything\fR, first write a JSON file into /etc/ansible/setup on each remote system with the values max_clients and http_port\&.
Next, use a Jinja2 template locally residing at /srv/templates/httpd\&.j2 to write the Apache config file on each host to the path /etc/httpd/conf, using the previous values\&.
If and only if the config file changed, note that we need to restart apache at the end of the run, otherwise, don\(cqt bother because we already know it is running\&.
.SH"HIGH LEVEL EXPLANATION"
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Playbooks are executed top down and can contain multiple references to patterns\&. For instance, a playbook could do something to all webservers, then do something to all database servers, then do something different to all webservers again\&.
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For each pattern, the tasks in the \fItasks\fR list are executed in order for all hosts in the host file matching the pattern\&.
For each task, a name/action pair describes what the task is and what ansible module to use to accomplish the task, along with any arguments\&. Additional fields like \fIcomment:\fR can be added and will be ignored, so feel free to take notes in the file\&.
Handlers are like tasks, but are conditionally executed\&. If a module reports a \fIchange\fR, it can notify one or more handler by name\&. If notified, it will run only for hosts that changed\&.
