There's just 2 problems: I'm not very proficient in Ansible yet, and I'm not a huge fan of ansible in part because of the pain it caused in my last job. In fact, the more I learn, the less of a fan I become. Everything feels clunky, overly complex, and generally wrong...
I'm hoping the curve will end up looking something like this:
In other words, I pray that as I come to understand it better, I'll see that I have preconceptions that are prejudicing my opinion, and that the reality is that I've been wrong all along.
In other words, I pray that as I come to understand it better, I'll see that I have preconceptions that are prejudicing my opinion, and that the reality is that I've been wrong all along.
I really hope that I'm currently right near the bottom of that curve and that I'm going to become an Ansible evangelist Any Moment Now:
Alas, I've got a sneaking suspicion that won't be the case:
In fact, I think the curve isn't even the right shape:
So with that rant out of the way, here's a few things I've learned:
1) ansible is not the same thing as ansible-playbook. ansible-playbook seems to be a tool for running playboook .yml files that declare how roles, inventories and other playbook .yml files define your infrastructure.
2) To ask ansible to run a command on all nodes in a certain group:
$ ansible -i {inventory} {group} -m shell -a "{command}"
3) To add a crontab entry that runs at 11:30pm every day via ansible, put this in roles/{role}/tasks/main.yml :
- name: {some name}
cron: user="root" name="cron repair" state=present minute="30" hour="23" day="*" job="{path-to-script}"
tags:
- {tag1}
- {tag2}
4) Run a shell command against a glob-selected subset of nodes:
$ ansible -i {inventory} {group} -l "{prefix}*" -m shell -a "{command}"
5) List hosts matching given pattern:
$ ansible {pattern} --list-hosts
... Expect more stupid ansible tricks to appear here ...
