This book is designed to introduce you to using Ansible to manage your servers. You’ll learn how to install and configure Ansible on a control node, and then how to use it to configure and run commands on remote servers. You’ll also learn how to collect tasks into complete Playbooks to automate server setup from start to finish.

This book is based on the How To Manage Remote Servers with Ansible tutorial series found on DigitalOcean Community. The topics that it covers include how to:

1. Become familiar with configuration management tools and processes, and the benefits of using them to manage your infrastructure.
2. Install and configure Ansible on an Ubuntu 20.04 control node, ensuring that your servers are properly set up and that you are able to execute remote instructions through Ansible.
3. Build inventory files and organize your servers into groups to selectively control how and where Ansible commands are run.
4. Run Ad Hoc commands to execute individual tasks on one, or multiple remote servers.
5. Package individual commands into Playbooks that you can use to automate the provisioning of multiple servers, and how to run specific sets of tasks in Playbooks using tags.

Each chapter is usable on its own as a reference, or as part of a progressive guide to learning how to manage your servers with Ansible. If you’re familiar with a topic, or are more interested in a particular section, feel free to jump to the chapter that best suits your purpose.

Conditions of Use

This book is licensed under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-SA). You can download the ebook How To Manage Remote Servers with Ansible for free.