Day 56: Understanding Ad-hoc commands in Ansible

In the ever-evolving landscape of IT automation, Ansible has emerged as a powerful and versatile tool for managing and orchestrating complex infrastructures. On our journey to demystify this automation marvel, we’ve arrived at Day 56, where we delve into the realm of “Ad-hoc commands in Ansible.”

To put simply, Ansible ad hoc commands are one-liner Linux shell commands and playbooks are like a shell script, a collective of many commands with logic.

Ansible ad hoc commands come handy when you want to perform a quick task.

Tasks

Task 1) Write an ansible ad hoc ping command to ping 3 servers from inventory file

To ping all the servers run below command

ansible -m ping all -i /etc/ansible/hosts

Task 2) Write an ansible ad hoc command to check uptime

To check the uptime run below command

ansible -m command -a “uptime” -i /etc/ansible/hosts all

Task 3) Check the free memory or memory usage of hosts using ansible ad hoc command

To check the memory usage run below

ansible -m command -a “free -m” -i /etc/ansible/hosts all