Playbooks are written in yaml format, and you can actually choose where to store your playbooks. In my case I’ll create a folder called “playbooks” for storing my playbooks, and I’ll create this in the root user’s home directory:
[root@controller ~]# pwd /root [root@controller ~]# mkdir playbooks [root@controller ~]# cd playbooks [root@controller playbooks]# pwd /root/playbooks
In this directory, I’ll then create the following file:
[root@controller playbooks]# cat HelloWorld.yml
---
- name: This is a hello-world example
hosts: ansibleclient01.local
tasks:
- name: Create a file called '/tmp/testfile.txt' with the content 'hello world'.
copy:
content: "hello world\n"
dest: /tmp/testfile.txt
This playbook is designed to create the file “/tmp/testfile.txt” on the client ansibleclient01.local using ansible’s copy module.
You can think of this playbook as a script that you can execute. You can execute this playbook using the “ansible-playbook” command:
[root@controller playbooks]# ansible-playbook HelloWorld.yml PLAY [This is a hello-world example] ******************************************* TASK [setup] ******************************************************************* ok: [ansibleclient01.local] TASK [Create a file called '/tmp/testfile.txt' with the content 'hello world'.] changed: [ansibleclient01.local] PLAY RECAP ********************************************************************* ansibleclient01.local : ok=2 changed=1 unreachable=0 failed=0
This results in the following file being created on the client:
[root@ansibleclient01 /]# cat /tmp/testfile.txt hello world
Now let’s delete the testfile.txt. Then return back to the controller.
Now let’s create testfile.txt in a different way, this time using a static file. we do this by first creating a static file and placing it in a logical location. In my case I created a folder called “files” and placed the testfile.txt in it:
[root@controller playbooks]# tree . ├── files │ └── testfile.txt └── HelloWorld.yml
1 directory, 2 files [root@controller playbooks]# cat files/testfile.txt hello world
I then replaced the copy module’s “content” attribute to “src”:
[root@controller playbooks]# cat HelloWorld.yml
---
- name: This is a hello-world example
hosts: ansibleclient01.local
tasks:
- name: Create a file called '/tmp/testfile.txt' with the content 'hello world'.
copy:
src: ./files/testfile.txt
dest: /tmp/testfile.txt
Notice, I think the src path is relative to where the playbook’s location. You can use absolute path but that will make it inflexible to move the static file to another location.
http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/playbooks_intro.html