Create automation content with playbooks

Create a playbook

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A playbook contains one or more plays. A basic play contains the following parameters:

• Name: a brief description of the overall function of the playbook, which assists in keeping it readable and organized for all users.
• Hosts: identifies the target or targets for Ansible to run against.
• Become statements: this optional statement can be set to true or yes to enable privilege escalation using a become plugin (such as sudo, su, pfexec, doas, pbrun, dzdo, ksu).
• Tasks: this is the list of actions that get executed against each host in the play.

Here is an example of a play in a playbook. You can see the name of the play, the host, and the list of tasks included in the play.

- name: Set Up a Project and Job Template
  hosts: host.name.ip
  become: true

  tasks:
    - name: Create a Project
      ansible.controller.project:
        name: Job Template Test Project
        state: present
        scm_type: git
        scm_url: https://github.com/ansible/ansible-tower-samples.git

    - name: Create a Job Template
      ansible.controller.job_template:
        name: my-job-1
        project: Job Template Test Project
        inventory: Demo Inventory
        playbook: hello_world.yml
        job_type: run
        state: present

For more detailed guidance on authoring playbooks, consult the following documentation:

• Developing automation content
• Creating playbooks and viewing playbook explanations in the Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed with IBM watsonx Code Assistant User Guide to learn how to generate a playbook with AI.
• Getting started with playbooks