Automate with Ansible: Part 2

Let’s ping some VMs with Ansible, bruh!

Previous

Automate with Ansible: Part 1

Using Virtualbox VMs

In this portion I’ll be using VMs I have setup on my local machine inside virtualbox to see if we can connect with Ansible.

If you already have virtualbox installed and need to make sure your VMs are able to talk to each other and/or your local machine, then check this out:

Oracle Virtualbox: Part 1

The only other thing that you will need for now is the ability to SSH into your VMs — See here:

Linux Server Install: Part 4

We know there are a couple ways to SSH into your servers you can SSH in using just a password or you can ssh in using key-based authentication.

Ansible recommends key-based authentication and I do too, however I don’t want this tutorial to be a non-starter to where now you have to do all of that before you can start ansible so I’ll cover how to use a password for your servers and then in another Automate with Ansible section, I’ll show you how to create a task to set-up key-based authentication.

Create a directory called: ansible

mkdir ansible && cd ansible

Inside there make another directory called: inventory

mkdir inventory && cd inventory

Add a file called: hosts (don’t worry about an extension — it’s basically an .ini file)

touch hosts