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Advanced Features in Ansible Playbooks

There are a number of features unique to Ansible playbooks which provide robust functionality. This exercise explores many of these features in a practical scenario of deploying a web server. Most notably, this exercise deals with confidential data in an Ansible vault and working with tags in Ansible playbooks.

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Path Info

Level
Clock icon Advanced
Duration
Clock icon 1h 30m
Last updated
Clock icon Aug 25, 2025

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Table of Contents

  1. Challenge

    Use ansible-vault to protect the confidential information.

    Use ansible-vault to encrypt /home/ansible/confidential to protect the confidential information stored within using the password "I love ansible".

    Run ansible-vault encrypt /home/ansible/confidential and supply the password "I love ansible".

  2. Challenge

    Create a playbook that deploys httpd on webservers.

    Create a playbook in /home/ansible/webserver.yml that deploys httpd on webservers. It should be tagged with base-install and contain a handler that restarts the httpd daemon that is flagged by both installation and service manipulation for httpd.

    Create the file /home/ansible/webserver.yml and add the following content:

    - hosts: webservers
  become: yes
  vars_files:
    - /home/ansible/confidential
  tasks:
    - name: install httpd
      yum:
        name: httpd
        state: latest
      notify: httpd service
      tags:
        - base-install
  handlers:
    - name: Restart and enable httpd
      service:
        name: httpd
        state: restarted
        enabled: yes
      listen: httpd service

  3. Challenge

    Deploy the templates stored on the control node to the webservers group.

    Configure /home/ansible/webserver.yml to deploy the templates /home/ansible/vhost.conf.j2 and /home/ansible/htpasswd.j2 stored on the control node to the webservers group. httpd must restart on config change. The tasks should be tagged vhost.

    Add the following text to /home/ansible/webserver.yml just before the handler section:

        - name: configure virtual host
      template:
        src: /home/ansible/vhost.conf.j2
        dest: /etc/httpd/conf.d/vhost.conf
      notify: httpd service
      tags:
        - vhost
    - name: configure site auth
      template:
        src: /home/ansible/htpasswd.j2
        dest: /etc/httpd/conf/htpasswd
      notify: httpd service
      tags:
        - vhost

  4. Challenge

    Asynchronously execute data-job on webservers.

    Configure /home/ansible/webserver.yml to asynchronously execute /opt/data-job.sh located on webservers with a timeout of 600 seconds and no polling. The task should be tagged with data-job.

    Add the following text to /home/ansible/webserver.yml just before the handler section: - name: run data job command: /opt/data-job.sh async: 600 poll: 0 tags: - data-job

  5. Challenge

    Execute playbook to verify your playbook works correctly.

    Execute playbook /home/ansible/webserver.yml to verify your playbook works correctly.

    Run ansible-playbook --ask-vault-pass /home/ansible/webserver.yml from the control node providing the vault password "I love ansible".

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