Ansible Workbench

Messing around with Ansible.

Check Mode

Run the playbook with the --check flag to see if any changes would be required, e.g.:

ansible-playbook playbooks/setup-app.yaml --check

Tags

Run only tagged tasks

Single tag

ansible-playbook playbooks/setup-app.yaml --tags upload

Multiple tags

ansible-playbook playbooks/setup-app.yaml --tags create,upload

Skip over tagged tasks and run everything else

ansible-playbook playbooks/setup-app.yaml --skip-tags upload

Ansible Vault

Ansible Vault gives us a secure method of storing secrets; they will be encrypted with a password, and can then be checked in to source control.

Create a new secrets file

ansible-vault create vars/secret-variables.yaml

See its contents

ansible-vault view vars/secret-variables.yaml

Use the secret variables

This command by itself will no longer work, now that it is making use of the secret variables file which Ansible Vault has encrypted with a password:

ansible-playbook playbooks/setup-app.yaml

We must supply the --ask-vault-pass flag and go through the subsequent password prompt in order to access the secret variables encrypted into this file:

ansible-playbook playbooks/setup-app.yaml --ask-vault-pass