🧑‍💻 How to Write Your First Ansible Playbook — Step by Step

Welcome back to “Back to the cloud” — your no-BS guide to mastering DevOps, Cloud, and AI workflows.

In the last issue, we covered:
➡ 5 Practical Ansible Use Cases for DevOps Engineers.
If you missed it, catch up here.

🔥 Today’s Goal:

Write and run your first Ansible playbook — even if you’ve never automated anything before.

🧠 What is an Ansible Playbook?

A Playbook is a simple YAML file where you:

• Define which machines to target.

• Describe tasks you want to automate.

• Execute them in order — repeatable and error-free.

No Python required. No fancy syntax.

💻 Step 1: Define Your Inventory

First, list your servers in a file called hosts.ini:

[webservers]
192.168.1.10
192.168.1.11

This tells Ansible where to run your tasks.

📜 Step 2: Create Your Playbook File

Save this as install_apache.yml:

---
- name: Install Apache on Web Servers
  hosts: webservers
  become: yes

  tasks:
    - name: Ensure Apache is installed
      apt:
        name: apache2
        state: present

This playbook does exactly what it says:
➡ Ensures Apache is installed on all webservers.

⚡ Step 3: Run the Playbook

Open your terminal and run:

ansible-playbook -i hosts.ini install_apache.yml

Ansible will:

• SSH into each server.

• Check if Apache is installed.

• Install it if missing.

💡 What’s Happening Behind the Scenes?

Ansible connects via SSH.
No agents, no daemons.
It simply reads your YAML file and executes the defined tasks, reporting success or failure.

🧠 Bonus Tip: Idempotency

Ansible is designed to be idempotent —
Run the same playbook 10 times, and if nothing’s changed, nothing gets re-applied.

This ensures: ✅ Safe re-runs.
✅ Predictable infrastructure.
✅ Clean, auditable changes.

🎯 Next Week:

“Breaking Down Ansible Roles: Why and How to Use Them for Clean Code.”

If you want to avoid spaghetti-style playbooks, you don’t want to miss this one!

💬 Question for You:

What would be your first automation project using Ansible?
Reply and let me know — I might turn it into a future tutorial!