Ansible: Up and Running, 3rd Edition

Chapter 3. Playbooks: A Beginning

When you start using Ansible, one of the first things you’ll do is begin writing playbooks. Playbook is the term that Ansible uses for a configuration management script. Let’s look at an example: here is a playbook for installing the NGINX web server and configuring it for secure communication.

If you follow along in this chapter, you should end up with the directory tree listed here:

.
├── Vagrantfile
├── ansible.cfg
├── files
│   ├── index.html
│   ├── nginx.conf
│   ├── nginx.crt
│   └── nginx.key
├── inventory
│   └── vagrant.ini
├── requirements.txt
├── templates
│   ├── index.html.j2
│   └── nginx.conf.j2
├── webservers-tls.yml
├── webservers.yml
└── webservers2.yml

Preliminaries

Modify your Vagrantfile so it looks like this:

Vagrant.configure(2) do |config|
  config.vm.box = "ubuntu/focal64"
  config.vm.hostname = "testserver"
  config.vm.network "forwarded_port",
    id: 'ssh', guest: 22, host: 2202, host_ip: "127.0.0.1", auto_correct: false
  config.vm.network "forwarded_port",
    id: 'http', guest: 80, host: 8080, host_ip: "127.0.0.1"
  config.vm.network "forwarded_port",
    id: 'https', guest: 443, host: 8443, host_ip: "127.0.0.1"
  # disable updating guest additions
  if Vagrant.has_plugin?("vagrant-vbguest")
    config.vbguest.auto_update = false
  end
  config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |virtualbox|
    virtualbox.name = "ch03"
  end
end

This maps port 8080 on your local machine to port 80 of the Vagrant machine, and port 8443 on your local machine to port 443 on ...