Ansible – A "hello world" Playbook

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 a yaml file called 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 worldn
        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

In the HelloWorld.yml file I then changed the copy module's content attribute to src:

---
- 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