Playbooks

In Ansible, a playbook is a set of instructions that define a series of tasks to be executed on one or more hosts. Playbooks are written in YAML format and contain a list of plays, where each play is a set of tasks to be executed on a specific set of hosts.

Each task in a playbook is a unit of work that can perform a specific action, such as installing a package, starting a service, or copying a file. Tasks are executed in the order defined in the playbook, and Ansible ensures that tasks are idempotent, meaning that they can be run multiple times without changing the system state if the desired state has already been achieved.

Playbooks can also contain variables that can be used to customize the behavior of the tasks, as well as conditionals and loops that allow for more complex logic to be applied. Playbooks can also include roles, which are collections of tasks and templates that can be reused across multiple playbooks or projects.

Playbooks are executed using the ansible-playbook command, which takes the path to the playbook as an argument. Ansible uses SSH to connect to the hosts defined in the playbook’s inventory and execute the tasks in the playbook.

Playbooks are a powerful tool for automating system administration tasks and can be used to deploy and manage entire application stacks, from the infrastructure level up to the application level.

Playbook standards

playbook.yml a playbook is typically named this way

--- this three-dash marks the file a YAML