.. _working_with_playbooks:

Working with playbooks

Playbooks record and execute Ansible's configuration, deployment, and orchestration functions. They can describe a policy you want your remote systems to enforce, or a set of steps in a general IT process.

If Ansible modules are the tools in your workshop, playbooks are your instruction manuals, and your inventory of hosts is your raw material.

At a basic level, playbooks can be used to manage configurations of and deployments to remote machines. At a more advanced level, they can sequence multi-tier rollouts involving rolling updates and can delegate actions to other hosts, interacting with monitoring servers and load balancers along the way.

Playbooks are designed to be human-readable and are developed in a basic text language. There are multiple ways to organize playbooks and the files they include, and we'll offer up some suggestions on that and making the most out of Ansible.

.. toctree:: :maxdepth: 2

playbooks_templating playbooks_filters playbooks_tests playbooks_lookups playbooks_python_version playbooks_templating_now playbooks_templating_undef playbooks_loops playbooks_delegation playbooks_conditionals playbooks_blocks playbooks_handlers playbooks_error_handling playbooks_environment playbooks_reuse playbooks_reuse_roles playbooks_module_defaults playbooks_prompts playbooks_variables playbooks_vars_facts playbooks_variables_validation guide_rolling_upgrade