Basic Ping Role with Ansible in a Playbook

This is a short post on how to create a basic role to reference the ping module in Ansible.

Directory Structure

This is our directory strucuture:

$ tree .
.
├── inventory.ini
├── playbooks
│   └── myplaybook.yml
└── roles
    └── ping
        └── tasks
            └── main.yml

4 directories, 3 files

Create the directories:

$ mkdir -p playbooks
$ mkdir -p roles/ping/tasks

Our inventory.ini includes the hosts that we will be using, and in this case I will be defining a group named rpifleet with all the host nested under that group and I'm using the user pi and my private ssh key ~/.ssh/id_rsa:

$ cat inventory.ini
[rpifleet]
rpi-01 ansible_host=rpi-01.local ansible_user=pi ansible_ssh_private_key_file=~/.ssh/id_rsa ansible_python_interpreter=/usr/bin/python3
rpi-02 ansible_host=rpi-02.local ansible_user=pi ansible_ssh_private_key_file=~/.ssh/id_rsa ansible_python_interpreter=/usr/bin/python3
[rpifleet:vars]
ansible_ssh_common_args='-o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null'

Next our role is a basic role that will reference our ping module, so from our main playbook we will reference the role that we are defining:

$ cat roles/ping/tasks/main.yml
---
- name: Test Ping
  action: ping

Now that we have defined our ping role, we need to include it into our playbook:

$ cat playbooks/myplaybook.yml
---
- name: ping raspberry pi fleet
  hosts: rpifleet
  roles:
    - { role: ../roles/ping }

You will see due to my playbooks directory being non-default, I defined the path to the role directory.

Install Ansible

Next we need to install ansible:

$ pip install ansible

Run the Ansible Playbook

Now run the playbook which will ping the nodes using ssh. Using the ping module is useful when testing the connection to your nodes:

$ ansible-playbook -i inventory.ini playbooks/myplaybook.yml

PLAY [ping raspberry pi fleet] *****************************************************

TASK [Gathering Facts] *************************************************************
ok: [rpi-02]
ok: [rpi-01]

TASK [../roles/ping : Test Ping] ***************************************************
ok: [rpi-02]
ok: [rpi-01]

PLAY RECAP *************************************************************************
rpi-01                     : ok=2    changed=0    unreachable=0    failed=0    skipped=0    rescued=0    ignored=0
rpi-02                     : ok=2    changed=0    unreachable=0    failed=0    skipped=0    rescued=0    ignored=0

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