Automate your infrastructure reliably and repeatably with Ansible. This compact course takes participants from their first playbook to production-ready automation pipelines — covering modules, roles, dynamic inventories, Jinja2 templates, secrets management with Ansible Vault, and quality assurance with Molecule and GitLab CI.

Who is this training for?

System administrators, DevOps engineers, and developers who want to automate server configuration, application deployment, or cross-platform workflows using Ansible.

Agenda

Introduction

• Motivation and comparison with other automation tools
• Infrastructure as Code principles
• How Ansible works internally

Fundamentals

• Overview of Ansible tooling
• Ad-hoc commands
• YAML format overview
• First steps: creating a project, SSH access, defining an inventory, writing the first playbook
• Managing packages, variables, conditionals, delegation, and iteration

Modules

• Core modules: user, group, file, lineinfile, copy, fetch, template, get_url, debug, command
• Distribution-specific modules: apt, apt_repository, dnf
• Idempotency principle
• Writing custom modules in Bash and Python

Inventory, Playbooks, and Roles

• Static and dynamic inventories
• Host grouping
• Defining and using roles as organisational units
• Introduction to Collections and Ansible Galaxy
• Execution acceleration
• Troubleshooting and debugging

Automation and Dynamic Execution

• Jinja2 templates and parameterised configurations — syntax, expressions, statements, filters
• Windows deployment: WinRM and SSH access, software and update management, users and groups
• Network automation

Variables and Secrets

• Defining and using variables in playbooks
• Ansible Facts and magic variables
• Encrypting secrets with ansible-vault

Continuous Integration

• Ansible Lint: installation and usage
• Molecule: installation, usage, running and verifying tests
• GitLab CI: defining pipelines and installing a CI runner