Creating Playbooks

Ad-Hoc Commands

First, we should be sure that ansible is configured correctly, to run commands on a server or a group of servers within the /etc/ansible/hosts file, run any of the below commands

ansible -m ping hostname
ansible -m ping 134.23.4.5

ansible -a "sudo ls /" hostname
ansible -a "sudo ls /" 134.23.4.5

ansible -a "free -h" hostname
ansible -a "free -h" 134.23.4.5

While the above is an example of running bash commands on remote hosts ad-hoc via the commandline, you can also run ansible modules from the commandline in a similar way -

ansible remotehostname -m fetch -a "src=/home/remoteuser/path/file.txt dest=/home/localuser/" flat=yes"

Here, we grab file.txt from a remote host and copy it to our local home directory. Where -m is selecting which module to use and -a is providing the options that you would specify within a normal playbook via a command. Be sure to enclose any module options after -a with double quotes or the command will fail. See the Ansible documentation for each module for more information on their arguments.

Creating Playbooks

Ansible can be configured to carry out tedious or otherwise common tasks on any number of hosts, as we see below in the example playbook where Ansible is being used to backup an instance of Bookstacks.

---
- hosts: bookstack
  become: yes
  tasks:
    - name: Backup Bookstack container files
      command: tar -cvzf bookstack-backup.tar.gz /home/admin/bookstack
    - name: Fetch backup files from remote host
      command: scp -P 2222 -i /home/kapak/.ssh/id_rsa /home/admin/bookstack-backup.tar.gz admin@sub.domain.com:/home/admin/backups/bookstack/

Here, we use scp instead of Ansible's Fetch module to save memory on the small host that runs the BookStack you are viewing. When fetching large files, memory errors can be encountered so here we have worked around the module using an alternative method for transferring our files.