Awesome Ansible

This is a collaborative community curated list of awesome Ansible resources, tools, Roles, tutorials and other related stuff.

Ansible is an open source toolkit, written in Python, it is used for configuration management, application deployment, continuous delivery, IT infrastructure automation and automation in general.

:warning: Before editing the list to add your project, take a look at the Ansible ecosystem project development resources. Let’s make sure our users, contributors, and maintainers have the best possible experience!

Contents

• Awesome Ansible
  • Contents
  • Official resources
  • Community
  • Tutorials
  • Books
  • Videos
  • Tools
  • Blog posts and opinions
    • German
    • French
  • Playbooks, Roles and Collections
  • Editor and IDE Integrations

Official resources

Official resources by and for Ansible.

• Latest Ansible Documentation - Latest user guide and documentation for Ansible.
• Ansible Galaxy Website - Official repository and community site for Ansible Roles.
• Ansible Blog - Official Ansible blog.

Community

Join the Ansible forum:

• Get Help - Get help or help others. Please add appropriate tags if you start new discussions.
• Bullhorn newsletter - Used to announce releases and important changes.
• Social Spaces - Gather and interact with fellow enthusiasts.
• News & Announcements - Track project-wide announcements including social events.

For more information about communication, see the Ansible communication guide.

Tutorials

Tutorials and courses to learn Ansible.

• How To Manage Remote Servers with Ansible - This Tutorial goes over how to use Ansible to manage remote servers.
• Ansible Tutorial by leucos - 12 Step Tutorial for Ansible.
• Programming Community Curated Resources for learning Ansible - A list of recommended resources.
• Ansible TopTechSkills.com Tutorial Series on Ansible - Tutorials on how to Install and use Ansible.
• Official Ansible labs by Red Hat - Training Course for Ansible Automation Platform.
• Ansible Tutorials on DigitalOcean - Basic tutorials on DigitalOcean.com.
• Ansible Tutorial by BlueBanquise team - Basic Ansible tutorial.
• Ansible Tutorial for Beginners: Playbook & Examples - Introduction to Ansible for beginners.
• Ansible Tutorials for Beginners and Advanced - Workshop on multiple topics with different levels of difficulty.
• Ansible For DevOps - This repository contains Ansible examples developed to support different sections of Ansible for DevOps by Jeff Geerling, which is listed in the following section of books about Ansible.

Books

Books about Ansible.

• Ansible for DevOps - This book helps to start using Ansible to provision and manage anywhere from one to thousands of servers. Free sample can be read here.
• Ansible for Kubernetes - Deploy and maintain real-world massively-scalable and high-available applications with Ansible.
• How To Manage Remote Servers with Ansible eBook - This book is based on the “How To Manage Remote Servers with Ansible” tutorial series.
• The Tao of Ansible: Mastering Automation with Simplicity and Grace - A guide to Ansible that emphasizes simplicity, elegance, and the philosophy of automation without complexity.

Videos

Video tutorials and Ansible training.

• Ansible YouTube Channel - Official Ansible YouTube channel.
• Introduction to Ansible - Introduction to Ansible by Cloud Academy.
• Ansible 101 by Jeff Geerling - Great video series on Ansible, by Jeff Geerling.
• Ansible TopTechSkills.com Tutorial Series on YouTube - Video tutorials on Ansible.
• Ansible Essentials - Course - Free Video Classroom on Ansible essentials by Red Hat.
• Complete Ansible Course 2020 by DevOps Journey - Free Video Course on Ansible including labs to follow along.
• Getting started with Ansible - YouTube tutorial series by LearnLinuxTV.

Tools

Tools for and using Ansible.

• Automation Controller - Automation Controller (formerly Ansible Tower) by Red Hat helps you scale IT automation, manage complex deployments and speed productivity. Extend the power of Ansible to your entire team.
• AWX - AWX provides a web-based user interface, REST API, and task engine built on top of Ansible. It is the upstream project for Automation Controller, a commercial derivative of AWX.
• Ansible Lint - Checks Playbooks for best practices and behavior that could potentially be improved.
• Ansible Doctor - Simple annotation like documentation generator for Ansible roles based on Jinja2 templates.
• Ansible cmdb - Takes the output of Ansible’s fact gathering and converts it into a static HTML page.
• ARA - ARA Records Ansible playbooks and makes them easier to understand and troubleshoot with a reporting API, UI and CLI.
• Ansible Inventory Grapher - Displays inventory inheritance hierarchies and the level at which variables are defined in an inventory.
• Mitogen for Ansible - Speed up Ansible substantially with Mitogen.
• Molecule - Molecule aids in the development and testing of Ansible roles.
• Packer Ansible Provisioner - This Provisioner can be used to automate VM Image creation via Packer with Ansible.
• Excel Ansible Inventory - Turn any Excel Spreadsheet into an Ansible Inventory.
• terraform.py - Ansible dynamic inventory script for parsing Terraform state files.
• ansible-navigator - A text-based user interface (TUI) for Ansible.
• squest - Self-service portal for Automation Controller job templates.
• ansible-bender - Tool which bends containers using Ansible playbooks and turns them into container images.
• ansible-runner - A tool and python library that helps when interfacing with Ansible directly or as part of another system whether that be through a container image interface, as a standalone tool, or as a Python module that can be imported.
• ansible-builder - Using Ansible content that depends on non-default dependencies can be tricky. Packages must be installed on each node, play nicely with other software installed on the host system, and be kept in sync.
• kics - SAST Tool that scans your ansible infrastructure as code playbooks for security vulnerabilities, compliance issues and misconfigurations.
• php-ansible Library - OOP-Wrapper for Ansible, making Ansible available in PHP.
• TD4A - Design aid for building and testing jinja2 templates, combines data in yaml format with a jinja2 template and render the output.
• Ansible Playbook Grapher - Command line tool to create a graph representing your Ansible playbook plays, tasks and roles.
• ansible-doc-extractor - A tool that extracts documentation from Ansible modules in the HTML form.
• Ansible Semaphore - Ansible Semaphore is a modern UI for Ansible.
• Steampunk Spotter - Provides an Assisted Automation Writing tool that analyzes and offers recommendations for your Ansible Playbooks.
• ansible-roster - Ansible Roster inventory plugin to generate inventory from a host oriented yaml file. Supports ranges, regex hostnames, file inclusions, and variable merging.
• Monkeyble - A callback plugin that allow to execute end-to-end tests on playbooks with a Pythonic testing and CI/CD approach to detect regressions.
• aar-doc - Automated Ansible Role Documentation - Generate documentation automatically from an Ansible role’s metadata.
• antsichaut - Automate the filling of a changelog.yaml used by antsibull-changelog.
• ansibledb - Flask API Web server that uses MongoDB as database to store Ansible reports and facts; this tool can be used to query hosts and facters managed Ansible as well search Ansible logs.
• Ansible Template Playground - Online playground for running, testing and sharing Ansible templates.

Blog posts and opinions

Best practices and other opinions on Ansible.

• Ansible (Real Life) Good Practices - Best practice guidelines.
• Testing Ansible Roles Against Windows with Test-Kitchen - Using Test-Kitchen with Ansible to apply playbooks to Windows machines and test them with Pester.
• Ansible Best Practices by AndiDog - Practices covering many aspects of an Ansible setup, including hints to support different environments (testing, staging, production).
• Getting started with Ansible - Introduces Ansible, provides installation instructions and gives an interactive walkthrough of Ansible’s basic functionalities, like running Ansible playbooks and installing Ansible content.
• Taking Ansible apart - Describes and shows how most commonly used Ansible components work.
• Enhancing Ansible Development with SOLID Principles - Discover how the fundamental principles of SOLID—Single Responsibility, Open-Closed, Liskov Substitution, Interface Segregation, and Dependency Inversion—can significantly elevate your Ansible role and playbook development.
• Functional programming design patterns in Ansible code - Borrowing functional programming (FP) principles to improve Ansible code quality. How to adopt functional patterns like pure functions, clear separation of effects, immutability, composition, and lazy evaluation can make Ansible automation far easier to test, debug, understand, and extend.

German

• Ansible – Was ich am Ad-hoc-Modus schätze - Opinion what the author likes about the Ansible Ad-Hoc mode.

French

• Apprendre et Maitriser Ansible l’outil de gestion de configuration - A large of courses on Ansible in French.

Playbooks, Roles and Collections

Awesome production ready Playbooks, Roles and Collections to get you up and running.

• Ansible Vagrant Examples by geerlingguy - Ansible examples using Vagrant to deploy to local VMs.
• Ansible playbook for Linux machine setup - Ansible playbook for setting up a self-updating, hardened Debian/Ubuntu machine with Docker daemon.
• Ansible Lockdown - Ansible content to assist in both auditing and remediating against CIS or STIG baseline compliance for OS’s and Applications.
• DevSec Hardening Framework - The DevSec collection helps you harden your Linux Based OS as well as MySQL, NGINX and SSH Server/Services.
• T.A.D.S. boilerplate - Provision and deploy a Docker Swarm cluster to development environment and to production. Infrastructure as Code and DevOps best practices.
• Openstack Ansible - Ansible Playbooks for deploying OpenStack.
• Robert de Bock - A extensive collection of Ansible roles.
• DebOps - A extensive collection of Debian based Ansible Playbooks.
• ansible-ssm - An ansible role to provision physical and virtual hosts with the AWS SSM agent.
• BlueBanquise - An ansible coherent roles collection to deploy clusters.
• redhat-cop - Repositories with ansible topic of the Red Hat Communities of Practice project.

Editor and IDE Integrations

Awesome Integrations into Text Editors and IDE’s to make development with/for Ansible easier.

• Ansible Language Server - Language Server that adds support for Ansible, to compatible Editors.
• VS Code - official Ansible Extension - Adds language support for Ansible to Visual Studio Code and OpenVSX compatible editors by leveraging ansible-language-server.
• Vim - An open-source, free command-line text editor. Useful Vim plugins include:
  • Ansible vim - A vim syntax plugin for Ansible 2.x, it supports YAML playbooks, Jinja2 templates, and Ansible’s hosts files.
  • Ansible vim and neovim plugin - A vim plugin (lsp client) for Ansible, it supports autocompletion, syntax highlighting, hover, diagnostics, and goto support.
• Emacs - A free, open-source text editor and IDE that supports auto-indentation, syntax highlighting and a built in terminal shell (among other things):
  • lsp-mode - Ansible Language Server Protocol support for Emacs: provides syntax highlighting, auto-completion and diagnostics.
  • yaml-mode - YAML highlighting and syntax checking.
  • jinja2-mode - Jinja2 highlighting and syntax checking.
  • magit-mode - Git porcelain within Emacs.
  • flymake-ansible-lint - Ansible Lint integration with automatic/continuous annotation of errors, warnings, and info while editing.
• PyCharm - A full IDE for Python software development. Useful plugins include:
  • Ansible Lint - Ansible Lint integration with automatic/continuous annotation of errors, warnings, and info while editing.
  • Ansible Vault Integration - Ansible vault integration for IntelliJ IDEA with context actions for vaulting and unvaulting secrets.

ansible.md Github