Introduction to Ansible Transcripts
Chapter: Ansible Core Concepts
Lecture: Running Ad Hoc Tasks
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Let's use this example Ansible task and run it using the Ansible Ad-Hoc mode. Move over into your Mac or Linux environment
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where you're planning to work with Ansible. First we're going to test and were going to see that Git is not installed on our system.
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We do want to use Ansible to install it. Remember that you need to keep your virtualenv activated. So, use the source command
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point it to your virtualenv, then activate. You can use the pip freeze command to make sure that Ansible is actually installed.
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In this case, yes it is we're using version 2.6.2 Now let's run a couple of Ad-Hoc commands.
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We're just going to run these against our localhost system. And the first one is just to gather the facts. Now what do we mean by facts.
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A fact is a piece of data that Ansible gathers on the system before working with it. Ansible gathers a wide range of information.
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So that it knows how to take the actions specified in an Ad-Hoc command or in a Playbook. And we can see all the facts that Ansible gathers.
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Use this command: ansible localhost -m setup. This isn't going to apply any action. It will only gather the facts about our system.
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Now I put in localhost as a placeholder. We don't have a hosts file. Ansible will tell us that you couldn't find a host file.
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But it will gather the facts for our localhost system. When you execute that command, you're going to see
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a whole bunch of information about your current system. Ansible will do this every time it runs. For our next Ad-Hoc command type in ansible localhost
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as we just did, in the previous command and this time with -m specify the A-P-T apt module. Specify -a and pass in, name=git-core
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state=present, update_cache=yes specify -b, which explicitly states we wana use our superuser privileges in order to execute this command
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since we're installing a system wide package. Specify -K, which will force Ansible to ask you for your superuser password
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and then one final argument, which is -e where we set an additional variable which is the ansible_Python_interpreter=/usr/bin/Python3
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explicitly set as /usr/bin/Python3. In this case, this is to prevent Ansible from using the default Python 2 installation
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which does not have Ansible installed. Once you've got all that typed in, go ahead and hit execute. Now we're good to go.
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We have Git installed, we can use it on our system. So we just ran a couple of Ansible Ad-Hoc tasks. For the remainder of these videos
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we're going to run tasks through Playbooks. That's how you can run individual tasks if you want to test out a module
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or just do something quick from the command line.