Ansible Documentation ````````````````````` Welcome to the Ansible documentation. Ansible is an IT automation tool. It can configure systems, deploy software, and orchestrate more advanced IT orchestration such as continuous deployments or zero downtime rolling updates. Ansibe's goals are foremost those of simplicity and ease of use. It also has a strong focus on security and reliability, featuring a minimum of moving parts, usage of Open SSH for transport, and a language that is designed around auditability by humans -- even those not familiar with the program. This documentation covers the current released version of Ansible (1.3.X) and also some development version features (1.4). For recent features, in each section, the version of Ansible where the feature is added is indicated. Ansible produces a new major release approximately every 2 months. Before we dive into playbooks, configuration management, deployment, and orchestration, we'll learn how to get Ansible installed and some basic information. We'll go over how to execute ad-hoc commands in parallel across your nodes using /usr/bin/ansible. We'll also see what sort of modules are available in Ansible's core (though you can also write your own, which we'll also show later). .. _an_introduction: An Introduction ``````````````` .. toctree:: :maxdepth: 1 intro_installation intro_getting_started intro_inventory intro_dynamic_inventory intro_patterns intro_adhoc intro_configuration modules .. _overview: Overview ```````` .. image:: http://www.ansibleworks.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/ANSIBLE_DIAGRAM.jpg :alt: ansible architecture diagram :width: 788px :height: 436px .. _introduction_to_playbooks: An Introduction to Playbooks ```````````````````````````` Playbooks are Ansible's configuration, deployment, and orchestration language. They can describe a policy you want your remote systems to enforce, or a set of steps in a general IT process. At a basic level, playbooks can be used to manage configurations of and deployments to remote machines. At a more advanced level, they can sequence multi-tier rollouts involving rolling updates, and can delegate actions to other hosts, interacting with monitoring servers and load balancers along the way. There's no need to learn everything at once. You can start small and pick up more features over time as you need them. Playbooks are designed to be human-readable and are developed in a basic text language. There are multiple ways to organize playbooks and the files they include, and we'll offer up some suggestions on that and making the most out of Ansible. .. toctree:: :maxdepth: 1 playbooks playbooks_roles playbooks_variables playbooks_conditionals playbooks_loops playbooks_best_practices It is recommended to look at `Example Playbooks `_ while reading along with the playbook documentation. These illustrate best practices as well as how to put many of the various concepts together. .. ansibleworks_awx: Upgrading the Ansible Experience: AnsibleWorks AWX `````````````````````````````````````````````````` `AnsibleWorks `_, who also sponsors the Ansible community, also produces 'AWX', which is a web-based tool that makes Ansible even more easy to use for IT teams of all kinds. It's designed to be the hub for all of your automation tasks. AWX allows you to control access to who can access what, even allowing sharing of SSH credentials without someone being able to transfer those credentials. Inventory can be graphically managed or synced with a widde variety of cloud sources. It logs all of your jobs, integrates well with LDAP, and has an amazing browseable REST API. Find out more about AWX features and how to download it on the `AWX webpage `_. AWX is free for usage for up to 10 nodes, and comes bundled with amazing support from AnsibleWorks. As you would expect, AWX is installed using Ansible playbooks! .. _advanced_topics_in_playbooks: Advanced Topics In Playbooks ```````````````````````````` Here are some playbook features that not everyone may need to learn, but can be quite useful for particular applications. Browsing these topics is recommended as you may find some useful tips here, but feel free to learn Ansible first and adopt these only if they seem relevant or useful to your environment. .. toctree:: :maxdepth: 1 playbooks_acceleration playbooks_async playbooks_checkmode playbooks_delegation playbooks_environment playbooks_error_handling playbooks_lookups playbooks_prompts playbooks_tags .. _detailed_guides: Detailed Guides ``````````````` This section is new and evolving. The idea here is explore particular use cases in greater depth and provide a more "top down" explanation of some basic features. A chance to dive into some more topics in depth: .. toctree:: :maxdepth: 1 guide_aws Pending topics may include: Vagrant, Docker, Jenkins, Rackspace Cloud, Google Compute Engine, Linode/Digital Ocean, Continous Deployment, and more. .. _community_information: Community Information ````````````````````` Ansible is an open source project designed to bring together developers and administrators of all kinds to collaborate on building IT automation solutions that work well for them. Should you wish to get more involved -- whether in terms of just asking a question, helping other users, introducing new people to Ansible, or helping with the software or documentation, we welcome your contributions to the project. `Ways to interact `_ .. _developer_information: Developer Information ````````````````````` Learn how to build modules of your own in any language, and also how to extend ansible through several kinds of plugins. Explore Ansible's Python API and write Python plugins to integrate with other solutions in your environment. .. toctree:: :maxdepth: 1 developing_api developing_inventory developing_modules developing_plugins Developers will also likely be interested in the fully-discoverable `REST API `_ that is part of AnsibleWorks AWX. It's great for embedding Ansible in all manner of applications. .. _misc: Miscellaneous ````````````` .. toctree:: :maxdepth: 1 faq glossary YAMLSyntax