I've been wanting to use Chef or Puppet for a long time, but as a developer I've never had the time to automate my machines setup.

Chef and Puppet are well known solutions for a data center, used by sysadmins to deploy and sync on their machines. Here you'll only find a very simple Ansible example.

Context

I needed a tool to automate the recovery of my raspberry's machines in case of a natural disaster!

Before I was saving all my network, firewall, database, ... configuration files on a Git repository.

What I need now is a simple way of applying them to a running fresh system. That's were Ansible comes in...

Basics

The way Ansible works can be described in the following:

If you have SSH access to the machine, you can use Ansible.

The most basic ansible includes a playbook.yml where all the instructions are, and an inventory file that describes all the machines and variables.

ansible-playbook playbook.yml -i hosts -k  

playbook.yml

---

- hosts: local

  tasks:
  - name: run command
    command: touch {{ tmp_dir }}/example_playbook.txt

hosts

[local]
localhost

[local:vars]
tmp_dir=/tmp  

Ansible playbook's API provides you canned methods for apt-get, copying files, gem install...

More complex examples can be found at my examples-ansible repo. You'll find a simple ansible role there!

Simple isn't it?

Oscar out.