useful Ansible commands

This article includes some useful Ansible commands. I will try to write blogs by English. You may want to add my wechat public account or add my technical blogs's rss feed

How ansible works

Ansible works by connecting to your nodes and pushing out small programs, called "Ansible Modules" to them. These programs are written to be resource models of the desired state of the system. Ansible then executes these modules (over SSH by default), and removes them when finished.

your library of modules can reside on any machine, and there are no servers, daemons, or databases required.

Passwords are supported, but SSH keys with ssh-agent are one of the best ways use Ansible.

Useful commands, options and variables

Auto create all of the ansible directory structure for you

ansible-galaxy init roles/myrole

Become user joe and ask connection password

--become-user joe -k

Allow Ansible replace the interpreter used when executing python modules

Setting of an inventory variable ansible_python_interpreter=/some/special/python on host

Use specific port when connecting to host

Setting of an inventory variable ansible_port=9750 on host

Destination host is local host

If you are deploying for localhost, use the command option --connection=localhost to avoid SSH authentication

Locate the python module's directory

python -v
import ansible  # then you can see the module path

Obtain the module python script for debug

Set the ANSIBLE_KEEP_REMOTE_FILES environment variable