Ansible playbook to install utility tools in Linux

 Ansible is one of the most popular open-source software provisioning, configuration management and application-deployment tool enabling infrastructure as code. Ansible is mainly used as a DevOps tool and can perform a lot of tasks that otherwise are time-consuming, complex, repetitive, and can make a lot of errors or issues.

Let's write a simple ansible playbook which enables us to install few of the utility tools which are required by a System Administrator to troubleshoot a system. Let's say we have to install this tools in 10, 100 or even 1000 servers. With the help of this tiny powerful playbook anyone can install those required tools in a minute to thousand servers.

Assuming that, we have an ansible controller server and we have passwordless access to destination servers by doing ssh-copy-id. Additionally, we have an inventory file e.g. inventory.ini where we listed all destination servers IP or hostname  in a group like below:

# vi inventory.ini
[blablabla]
10.10.10.20
10.10.10.21
10.10.10.22

host1.abc.com

host2.abc.com

[db-nodes]
10.10.10.50
10.10.10.51

ssh-copy-id installs an SSH key on a server as an authorized key. Its purpose is to provision access without requiring a password for each login. This facilitates automated, passwordless logins and single sign-on using the SSH protocol.

Here is the playbook named required-packages.yaml

---
- hosts: blablabla
  tasks:
  - name : Installing net-tools service
    yum :
      name : net-tools
      state : present
  - name : Installing telnet service
    yum :
      name : telnet
      state : present
  - name : Installing iostat service
    yum :
      name : sysstat
      state : present
  - name : Installing dstat service
    yum :
      name : dstat
      state : present
  - name : Installing curl service
    yum :
      name : curl
      state : present  
---

Now from ansible controller, execute below command to invoke the playbook to apply to destination server group mentioned in inventory file e.g. inventory.ini

[root@ansible-controller ~]# ansible-playbook -i inventory.ini required-packages.yaml

voilà :-)

I am thankful to Tanzeeb thus dedicate this post for him.