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by Too
1688 days ago
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> Don't I still need to know shell programming for Ansible? No. Ansible has its own built in functions for creating files, managing systemd, docker and so on. These are built with idempotency in mind. You can however call out to shell for situations where there is no built in. There are a lot of people who only ever use this role, and just see ansible as the fleet orchestration layer. Which imo defeats most of the benefits of using it, you might as well ssh a full script in that case. As a side note I wouldn’t actually recommend Ansible for server management. Like you say learning all these blessed roles feels like relearning basics you already know and the syntax and directory structure is messy. It has no place if you use containers. |
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Do I still get idempotency if I do not use systemd or docker?
> You can however call out to shell for situations where there is no built in. There are a lot of people who only ever use this role, and just see ansible as the fleet orchestration layer. Which imo defeats most of the benefits of using it, you might as well ssh a full script in that case.
So it sounds like I wasn't entirely wrong in my first impressions that it would be useless for my situation where I don't think any of the "built ins" would really be suitable. Of the 8 machines on my network, only one has systemd (and I'm in the process of phasing it out because systemd seriously struggles to deal with services with dependencies on specific network interfaces being "UP", these issues are documented by freedesktop[0]).
> As a side note I wouldn’t actually recommend Ansible for server management.
Given the background of my infrastructure being a mixture of FreeBSD, OpenBSD, non-systemd Linux and systemd Linux machines. What would you recommend?
[0]: https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/NetworkTar...