Ansible Ad Hoc Commands Cheat Sheet
Ansible Ad Hoc Commands Cheat Sheet
ansible ad-hoc commands are used to run the tasks at onetime. if you want to run multiple times then you have to use ansible playbooks or roles.
Ansible Ad Hoc Commands syntax
ansible Hostgroup -m module -a arguments
Ansible ad hoc command with inventory
ansible -i /project/ansible/myhosts -m ping all
Here by using -i, we can mention inventory file path in ansible adhoc commands.
Ansible ad hoc ping
ansible all – m ping
It will ping all the hosts that you defined in hosts or inventory file.
Ansible ad hoc command to install any package
If you are hosts machines are centos/rhel then you can use yum module to install any packages.
ansible all -m yum -a “name=httpd state=present”
Here it will install httpd in all host systems.
if your hosts systems are ubuntu/debian you can use apt module
ansible all -m apt -a “name=httpd state=present”
It will install httpd in all host systems.
Ansible adhoc commands to Manage Services
To Ensure a service is started on all servers:
ansible web -m service -a “name=httpd state=started”
It will start httpd in all hosts that you defined in web group.
To restart the service:
ansible web -m service -a “name=httpd state=restarted”
To stop the service:
ansible web -m service -a “name=httpd state=stopped”
Ansible ad hoc command to create folder
ansible all -m file -a “path=/project/devops state=directory”
Here devops directory will created in hosts systems.
Ansible ad hoc commands copy
to copy a file to all hosts servers you can use this copy module
ansible web -m copy -a “src=/etc/hosts dest=/tmp/hosts”
Here web is the hosts group and it will copy the file called hosts from ansible control machine to all servers.
To use copy module we have to mention two arguments one is source path and another one is destination path.
Ansible ad hoc commands command module
To run any linux commands on host servers we can use this module.
ansible web -m command -a “free -m”
It will show you free memory in all host servers.
Ansible ad hoc command to create a group
ansible web -m group -a “name=devops state=present”
It will create a group called devops in all your hosts that you defined in web.
Ansible ad hoc command to create a file
ansible all -m file -a “path=/project/devops/abcd.txt state=touch”
Here it will create an empty file called abcd.txt in all remote servers.
To create a files and directories in ansible we use file module.
Ansible ad hoc command to create user
ansible all -m user -a “name=ansible group=devops password=ansible123”
It will create ansible user in all your host amchines and it will add this user to devops group and we can set password for this user with password argument.
Gathering Facts
To gather all facts of all remote servers you can use setup module.
ansible all -m setup
We can use this facts depends on our requirements, in some cases we use this facts to execute some conditional tasks.
hi, good article. I am facing issue after running following command:
ansible appgroup -m apt -a “name=httpd state=present”
appgroup contains my server IP
Error:
client-server | FAILED! => {
“ansible_facts”: {
“discovered_interpreter_python”: “/usr/bin/python3”
},
“cache_update_time”: 1613717534,
“cache_updated”: false,
“changed”: false,
“msg”: “‘/usr/bin/apt-get -y -o “Dpkg::Options::=–force-confdef” -o “Dpkg::Options::=–force-confold” install ‘httpd” failed: E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend – open (13: Permission denied)\nE: Unable to acquire the dpkg frontend lock (/var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend), are you root?\n”,
“rc”: 100,
“stderr”: “E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend – open (13: Permission denied)\nE: Unable to acquire the dpkg frontend lock (/var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend), are you root?\n”,
“stderr_lines”: [
“E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend – open (13: Permission denied)”,
“E: Unable to acquire the dpkg frontend lock (/var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend), are you root?”
],
“stdout”: “”,
“stdout_lines”: []
}
What could be the issue? Thanks in advance!