Intro to Playbooks — Ansible Documentation

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# Intro to Playbooks

## About Playbooks

Playbooks are a completely different way to use ansible than in adhoc task execution mode, and are particularly powerful.

Simply put, playbooks are the basis for a really simple configuration management and multi-machine deployment system, unlike any that already exist, and one that is very well suited to deploying complex applications.

Playbooks can declare configurations, but they can also orchestrate steps of any manual ordered process, even as different steps must bounce back and forth between sets of machines in particular orders. They can launch tasks synchronously or asynchronously.

While you might run the main `/usr/bin/ansible` program for ad-hoc tasks, playbooks are more likely to be kept in source control and used to push out your configuration or assure the configurations of your remote systems are in spec.

There are also some full sets of playbooks illustrating a lot of these techniques in the ansible-examples repository. We’d recommend looking at these in another tab as you go along.

There are also many jumping off points after you learn playbooks, so hop back to the documentation index after you’re done with this section.

## Playbook Language Example

Playbooks are expressed in YAML format (see YAML Syntax) and have a minimum of syntax, which intentionally tries to not be a programming language or script, but rather a model of a configuration or a process.

Each playbook is composed of one or more ‘plays’ in a list.

The goal of a play is to map a group of hosts to some well defined roles, represented by things ansible calls tasks. At a basic level, a task is nothing more than a call to an ansible module (see About Modules).

By composing a playbook of multiple ‘plays’, it is possible to orchestrate multi-machine deployments, running certain steps on all machines in the webservers group, then certain steps on the database server group, then more commands back on the webservers group, etc.

“plays” are more or less a sports analogy. You can have quite a lot of plays that affect your systems to do different things. It’s not as if you were just defining one particular state or model, and you can run different plays at different times.

For starters, here’s a playbook that contains just one play:

    ---
    - hosts: webservers
      vars:
        http_port: 80
        max_clients: 200
      remote_user: root
      tasks:
      - name: ensure apache is at the latest version
        yum: name=httpd state=latest
      - name: write the apache config file
        template: src=/srv/httpd.j2 dest=/etc/httpd.conf
        notify:
        - restart apache
      - name: ensure apache is running (and enable it at boot)
        service: name=httpd state=started enabled=yes
      handlers:
        - name: restart apache
          service: name=httpd state=restarted

When working with tasks that have really long parameters or modules that take many parameters, you can break tasks items over multiple lines to improve the structure. Below is another version of the above example but using YAML dictionaries to supply the modules with their `key=value` arguments.:

    ---
    - hosts: webservers
      vars:
        http_port: 80
        max_clients: 200
      remote_user: root
      tasks:
      - name: ensure apache is at the latest version
        yum:
          name: httpd
          state: latest
      - name: write the apache config file
        template:
          src: /srv/httpd.j2
          dest: /etc/httpd.conf
        notify:
        - restart apache
      - name: ensure apache is running
        service:
          name: httpd
          state: started
      handlers:
        - name: restart apache
          service:
            name: httpd
            state: restarted

Playbooks can contain multiple plays. You may have a playbook that targets first the web servers, and then the database servers. For example:

    ---
    - hosts: webservers
      remote_user: root

      tasks:
      - name: ensure apache is at the latest version
        yum: name=httpd state=latest
      - name: write the apache config file
        template: src=/srv/httpd.j2 dest=/etc/httpd.conf

    - hosts: databases
      remote_user: root

      tasks:
      - name: ensure postgresql is at the latest version
        yum: name=postgresql state=latest
      - name: ensure that postgresql is started
        service: name=postgresql state=started

You can use this method to switch between the host group you’re targeting, the username logging into the remote servers, whether to sudo or not, and so forth. Plays, like tasks, run in the order specified in the playbook: top to bottom.

Below, we’ll break down what the various features of the playbook language are.

## Basics

### Hosts and Users

For each play in a playbook, you get to choose which machines in your infrastructure to target and what remote user to complete the steps (called tasks) as.

The `hosts` line is a list of one or more groups or host patterns, separated by colons, as described in the Patterns documentation. The `remote_user` is just the name of the user account:

    ---
    - hosts: webservers
      remote_user: root

Note

The `remote_user` parameter was formerly called just `user`. It was renamed in Ansible 1.4 to make it more distinguishable from the user module (used to create users on remote systems).

Remote users can also be defined per task:

    ---
    - hosts: webservers
      remote_user: root
      tasks:
        - name: test connection
          ping:
          remote_user: yourname

Note

The `remote_user` parameter for tasks was added in 1.4.

Support for running things as another user is also available (see Become (Privilege Escalation)):

    ---
    - hosts: webservers
      remote_user: yourname
      become: yes

You can also use become on a particular task instead of the whole play:

    ---
    - hosts: webservers
      remote_user: yourname
      tasks:
        - service: name=nginx state=started
          become: yes
          become_method: sudo

Note

The become syntax deprecates the old sudo/su specific syntax beginning in 1.9.

You can also login as you, and then become a user different than root:

    ---
    - hosts: webservers
      remote_user: yourname
      become: yes
      become_user: postgres

You can also use other privilege escalation methods, like su:

    ---
    - hosts: webservers
      remote_user: yourname
      become: yes
      become_method: su

If you need to specify a password to sudo, run `ansible-playbook` with `--ask-become-pass` or when using the old sudo syntax `--ask-sudo-pass` (`-K`). If you run a become playbook and the playbook seems to hang, it’s probably stuck at the privilege escalation prompt. Just Control-C to kill it and run it again adding the appropriate password.

Important

When using `become_user` to a user other than root, the module arguments are briefly written into a random tempfile in `/tmp`. These are deleted immediately after the command is executed. This only occurs when changing privileges from a user like ‘bob’ to ‘timmy’, not when going from ‘bob’ to ‘root’, or logging in directly as ‘bob’ or ‘root’. If it concerns you that this data is briefly readable (not writable), avoid transferring unencrypted passwords with become_user set. In other cases, `/tmp` is not used and this does not come into play. Ansible also takes care to not log password parameters.

### Tasks list

Each play contains a list of tasks. Tasks are executed in order, one at a time, against all machines matched by the host pattern, before moving on to the next task. It is important to understand that, within a play, all hosts are going to get the same task directives. It is the purpose of a play to map a selection of hosts to tasks.

When running the playbook, which runs top to bottom, hosts with failed tasks are taken out of the rotation for the entire playbook. If things fail, simply correct the playbook file and rerun.

The goal of each task is to execute a module, with very specific arguments. Variables, as mentioned above, can be used in arguments to modules.

Modules should be idempotent, that is, running a module multiple times in a sequence should have the same effect as running it just once. One way to achieve idempotency is to have a module check whether its desired final state has already been achieved, and if that state has been achieved, to exit without performing any actions. If all the modules a playbook uses are idempotent, then the playbook itself is likely to be idempotent, so re-running the playbook should be safe.

The command and shell modules will typically rerun the same command again, which is totally ok if the command is something like `chmod` or `setsebool`, etc. Though there is a `creates` flag available which can be used to make these modules also idempotent.

Every task should have a `name`, which is included in the output from running the playbook. This is human readable output, and so it is useful to provide good descriptions of each task step. If the name is not provided though, the string fed to ‘action’ will be used for output.

Tasks can be declared using the legacy `action: module options` format, but it is recommended that you use the more conventional `module: options` format. This recommended format is used throughout the documentation, but you may encounter the older format in some playbooks.

Here is what a basic task looks like. As with most modules, the service module takes `key=value` arguments:

    tasks:
      - name: make sure apache is running
        service: name=httpd state=started

The command and shell modules are the only modules that just take a list of arguments and don’t use the `key=value` form. This makes them work as simply as you would expect:

    tasks:
      - name: disable selinux
        command: /sbin/setenforce 0

The command and shell module care about return codes, so if you have a command whose successful exit code is not zero, you may wish to do this:

    tasks:
      - name: run this command and ignore the result
        shell: /usr/bin/somecommand || /bin/true

Or this:

    tasks:
      - name: run this command and ignore the result
        shell: /usr/bin/somecommand
        ignore_errors: True

If the action line is getting too long for comfort you can break it on a space and indent any continuation lines:

    tasks:
      - name: Copy ansible inventory file to client
        copy: src=/etc/ansible/hosts dest=/etc/ansible/hosts
                owner=root group=root mode=0644

Variables can be used in action lines. Suppose you defined a variable called `vhost` in the `vars` section, you could do this:

    tasks:
      - name: create a virtual host file for {{ vhost }}
        template: src=somefile.j2 dest=/etc/httpd/conf.d/{{ vhost }}

Those same variables are usable in templates, which we’ll get to later.

Now in a very basic playbook all the tasks will be listed directly in that play, though it will usually make more sense to break up tasks using the `include:` directive. We’ll show that a bit later.

## Action Shorthand

New in version 0.8.

Ansible prefers listing modules like this in 0.8 and later:

    template: src=templates/foo.j2 dest=/etc/foo.conf

You will notice in earlier versions, this was only available as:

    action: template src=templates/foo.j2 dest=/etc/foo.conf

The old form continues to work in newer versions without any plan of deprecation.

## Handlers: Running Operations On Change

As we’ve mentioned, modules should be idempotent and can relay when they have made a change on the remote system. Playbooks recognize this and have a basic event system that can be used to respond to change.

These ‘notify’ actions are triggered at the end of each block of tasks in a play, and will only be triggered once even if notified by multiple different tasks.

For instance, multiple resources may indicate that apache needs to be restarted because they have changed a config file, but apache will only be bounced once to avoid unnecessary restarts.

Here’s an example of restarting two services when the contents of a file change, but only if the file changes:

    - name: template configuration file
      template: src=template.j2 dest=/etc/foo.conf
      notify:
         - restart memcached
         - restart apache

The things listed in the `notify` section of a task are called handlers.

Handlers are lists of tasks, not really any different from regular tasks, that are referenced by a globally unique name, and are notified by notifiers. If nothing notifies a handler, it will not run. Regardless of how many tasks notify a handler, it will run only once, after all of the tasks complete in a particular play.

Here’s an example handlers section:

    handlers:
        - name: restart memcached
          service: name=memcached state=restarted
        - name: restart apache
          service: name=apache state=restarted

As of Ansible 2.2, handlers can also “listen” to generic topics, and tasks can notify those topics as follows:

    handlers:
        - name: restart memcached
          service: name=memcached state=restarted
          listen: "restart web services"
        - name: restart apache
          service: name=apache state=restarted
          listen: "restart web services"

    tasks:
        - name: restart everything
          command: echo "this task will restart the web services"
          notify: "restart web services"

This use makes it much easier to trigger multiple handlers. It also decouples handlers from their names, making it easier to share handlers among playbooks and roles (especially when using 3rd party roles from a shared source like Galaxy).

Note

- Notify handlers are always run in the same order they are defined, not in the order listed in the notify-statement. This is also the case for handlers using listen.
- Handler names and listen topics live in a global namespace.
- If two handler tasks have the same name, only one will run. *
- You cannot notify a handler that is defined inside of an include. As of Ansible 2.1, this does work, however the include must be static.

Roles are described later on, but it’s worthwhile to point out that:

- handlers notified within `pre_tasks`, `tasks`, and `post_tasks` sections are automatically flushed in the end of section where they were notified;
- handlers notified within `roles` section are automatically flushed in the end of `tasks` section, but before any `tasks` handlers.

If you ever want to flush all the handler commands immediately though, in 1.2 and later, you can:

    tasks:
       - shell: some tasks go here
       - meta: flush_handlers
       - shell: some other tasks

In the above example any queued up handlers would be processed early when the `meta` statement was reached. This is a bit of a niche case but can come in handy from time to time.

## Executing A Playbook

Now that you’ve learned playbook syntax, how do you run a playbook? It’s simple. Let’s run a playbook using a parallelism level of 10:

    ansible-playbook playbook.yml -f 10

## Ansible-Pull

Should you want to invert the architecture of Ansible, so that nodes check in to a central location, instead of pushing configuration out to them, you can.

The `ansible-pull` is a small script that will checkout a repo of configuration instructions from git, and then run `ansible-playbook` against that content.

Assuming you load balance your checkout location, `ansible-pull` scales essentially infinitely.

Run `ansible-pull --help` for details.

There’s also a clever playbook available to configure `ansible-pull` via a crontab from push mode.

## Tips and Tricks

To check the syntax of a playbook, use `ansible-playbook` with the `--syntax-check` flag. This will run the playbook file through the parser to ensure its included files, roles, etc. have no syntax problems.

Look at the bottom of the playbook execution for a summary of the nodes that were targeted and how they performed. General failures and fatal “unreachable” communication attempts are kept separate in the counts.

If you ever want to see detailed output from successful modules as well as unsuccessful ones, use the `--verbose` flag. This is available in Ansible 0.5 and later.

Ansible playbook output is vastly upgraded if the cowsay package is installed. Try it!

To see what hosts would be affected by a playbook before you run it, you can do this:

    ansible-playbook playbook.yml --list-hosts

See also

YAML Syntax
  Learn about YAML syntax
Best Practices
  Various tips about managing playbooks in the real world
Ansible Documentation
  Hop back to the documentation index for a lot of special topics about playbooks
About Modules
  Learn about available modules
Developing Modules
  Learn how to extend Ansible by writing your own modules
Patterns
  Learn about how to select hosts
Github examples directory
  Complete end-to-end playbook examples
Mailing List
  Questions? Help? Ideas? Stop by the list on Google Groups