No one likes repetitive tasks. With Ansible, IT admins can begin automating away the drudgery from their daily tasks. Automation frees admins up to focus on efforts that help deliver more value to the business by speeding time to application delivery, and building on a culture of success. Ultimately, Ansible gives teams the one thing they can never get enough of time. Allowing smart people to focus on smart things.

Ansible is a simple automation language that can perfectly describe an IT application infrastructure. It’s easy-to-learn, self-documenting, and doesn’t require a grad-level computer science degree to read. Automation shouldn’t be more complex than the tasks it’s replacing.

When talk about ansible & pythin, We’re taking the automation into next level with limitless possibilities. You can imagine writing piece of python code which call Ansible to execute commands on servers.

While you can invoice commands directly from python code, But by using Ansible, You’re utilizing the benefits of simplicity, using Ansible modules, Idempotency and more…

Here we’ll move forward Ansible & python installation & running playbook from it.

Platform

• OS: Centos 7.9
• Ansible version: 2.9
• Python version: 3.6.8

Ansible installation

Ansible installation is pretty simple, You can follow procedures from Ansible website here

For centos, Ansible is part of EPEL-Release. Start with installation of EPEL-Release:

sudo yum install epel-release

Install Ansible:

sudo yum install ansible

Verify the installation:

ansible --version

Python installation

Install Python3:

yum install -y python3

Verify the installation:

python3

Install python modules using pip3 ( upgrade pip3 to latest version ):

yum install -y python3-pip
export LC_ALL="en_US.utf8"
pip install --upgrade pip
pip3 install ansible_runner

Create simple playbook

Let’s create a very simple playbook to print Hello World on local machine and text executing the playbook :

---
- name: "Simple playbook"
  hosts: localhost
  connection: local
  tasks:
    - name: Print message
      debug:
        msg: Hello Ansible World

Execute the playbook:

ansible-playbook playbook.yml

Playbook execution output should be like this:

[root@localhost /]# ansible-playbook playbook.yaml 
[WARNING]: provided hosts list is empty, only localhost is available. Note that the implicit localhost does not match 'all'

PLAY [Simple playbook] **********************************************************************************************************************************************

TASK [Gathering Facts] **********************************************************************************************************************************************
ok: [localhost]

TASK [Print message] ************************************************************************************************************************************************
ok: [localhost] => {
    "msg": "Hello Ansible World"
}

PLAY RECAP **********************************************************************************************************************************************************
localhost                  : ok=2    changed=0    unreachable=0    failed=0    skipped=0    rescued=0    ignored=0   

Running Ansible playbook from python

Running Ansible playbook from python, It has many ways to run it. The below is the simplest way to run it & will use ansible-runner python module.

For the below code, Replace the following variables:

• private_data_dir with the directory path that have the yml file
• playbook with the playbook file name

import ansible_runner
r = ansible_runner.run(private_data_dir='/ansible', playbook='playbook.yml')
print("{}: {}".format(r.status, r.rc))

Execute the python application:

python3 execute.py

Later on, We’ll discuss to fine-tune it to pass variables, execute on remote hosts,…

Using this approach, You’ll have endless possibilities of automation & integrations. You can use it in any solution like VMware, Cisco, Hardware,….