Automate Common Admin Tasks with Ansible

Here are the initial instructions and explanation of the lab environment. Read this while your environment is busy creating itself from nothing. Yes, this violates physics; we know. How fun!

To start with, you will build a simple Ansible inventory from scratch by creating and populating a YAML file containing reachability and authentication information for two Linux hosts that will be managed by Ansible. You will also learn how to confirm the Ansible inventory is structured properly through the "ansible-inventory" command.

You will verify that Ansible can connect to both Linux hosts using information within the Ansible inventory file, and will do this via a series of ad hoc Ansible commands.

Here, you will create a simple Ansible playbook that creates specific directories and files on Ansible-managed hosts. You will use a simple technique to have Ansible populate specific files with static content. You will also manage the permissions and ownership of files and directories on Ansible-managed hosts. Through this challenge, the concept of idempotency–where Ansible automation does not make changes to managed hosts unless changes need to be made–will be reinforced.

You will now build off the Ansible playbook developed in the previous challenge by adding tasks to create user accounts on your Ansible-managed hosts. You will also learn how to manage group membership of the newly created user accounts.

In prior challenges, you created a new file and a new directory, as well as a new user account and a new group. Now, you will tie both concepts together; in this challenge, you will augment your Ansible playbook to factor in file permissions and ownership.

Finally, you will continue to iterate on the Ansible playbook developed in previous challenges by adding tags to tasks within your Ansible playbook. You will then learn how to leverage tags, as well as limit the execution of Ansible automation to specific hosts in your inventory.

Welcome to the final challenge! This is your last chance to experiment in the environment. Clicking Finish Lab will end this little world that flittered into existence just for you.