Create a simple playbook to connect to managed hosts

Learn how to create a playbook that pings your hosts and prints a “Hello world” message.

Procedure

  1. Create a file named playbook.yaml in your ansible_quickstart directory, with the following content: 
    - name: My first play
  hosts: myhosts
  tasks:
   - name: Ping my hosts
     ansible.builtin.ping:

   - name: Print message
     ansible.builtin.debug:
      msg: Hello world
  2. Run your playbook, using the following command:

    ansible-playbook -i inventory.ini playbook.yaml

  3. Ansible returns the following output: 
    PLAY [My first play] ****************************************************************************

TASK [Gathering Facts] **************************************************************************
ok: [192.0.2.50]
ok: [192.0.2.51]
ok: [192.0.2.52]

TASK [Ping my hosts] ****************************************************************************
ok: [192.0.2.50]
ok: [192.0.2.51]
ok: [192.0.2.52]

TASK [Print message] ****************************************************************************
ok: [192.0.2.50] => {
    "msg": "Hello world"
}
ok: [192.0.2.51] => {
    "msg": "Hello world"
}
ok: [192.0.2.52] => {
    "msg": "Hello world"
}

PLAY RECAP **************************************************************************************
192.0.2.50: ok=3    changed=0    unreachable=0    failed=0    skipped=0    rescued=0    ignored=0
192.0.2.51: ok=3    changed=0    unreachable=0    failed=0    skipped=0    rescued=0    ignored=0
192.0.2.52: ok=3    changed=0    unreachable=0    failed=0    skipped=0    rescued=0    ignored=0

    In this output you can see:

    • The names that you give the play and each task. Always use descriptive names that make it easy to verify and troubleshoot playbooks.
    • The Gather Facts task runs implicitly. By default Ansible gathers information about your inventory that it can use in the playbook.
    • The status of each task. Each task has a status of ok which means it ran successfully.
    • The play recap that summarizes results of all tasks in the playbook per host. In this example, there are three tasks so ok=3 indicates that each task ran successfully.