How to Connect Windows with Ansible?

Hello Techies, this blog is the continuation of the last blog Install Ansible on Windows which is the second part of the series Ansible with Windows. Before you proceed, I recommend you to please take a look at the introductory blog of this series so to have an understanding of this series.

So, in the previous blog of we understand how to install Ansible on Windows platform. Now, in this blog we will see how we can connect the Ansible Controller (WSL) with the Windows host and do some operations.  As our environment is already setup, there are few steps we need to follow before we can test pinging the windows host and create our first playbook to make some changes on the same host.

Steps to follow:

1. Open Ubuntu App, switch to sudo and change directory to etc and there create Ansible folder.

2. Then we need to create a configuration file for ansible. Type vim ansible.cfg under /etc/ansible and then type “I” to insert and type. 

You can add additional configurations as per your requirements. You can find configuration here.

3. Now we need to create a host file which includes the details of the target machine. Here [app] signifies a group, and [app:vars] signifies additional information (variables) to be used for the connection with target host.

4. Now, we will try to ping the windows host, to see whether our Ansible Controller is communicating with our Target Host. So, let us ping now. 

Here, ansible is using the win_ping module to ping the app (our group name in host file which consist our Target Host IP) and we successfully pinged our Target Host from our Ansible Controller.

Now, we will create the playbook to interact with Target Host and do some changes. Type vim create_file_and_folder.yml and insert:

---
- name: Playbook to create folder, file and file with content
  hosts: app
  tasks:
	- name: Create a Folder
	  ansible.windows.win_file:
      	path: '{{ ansible_env.SystemDrive }}\ansible_folder'
      	state: directory
      
	- name: Create a Sub-Folder
	  ansible.windows.win_file:
      	path: '{{ ansible_env.SystemDrive }}\ansible_folder\ansible_sub_folder'
      	state: directory
      
	- name: Create a File
	  ansible.windows.win_file:
      	path: '{{ ansible_env.SystemDrive }}\ansible_folder\file1.txt'
      	state: touch
      
	- name: Create a file with content
	  ansible.windows.win_copy:
      	dest: '{{ ansible_env.SystemDrive }}\ansible_folder\file2.txt'
      	content: |
        	This is Line 1
        	This is Line 2
...

Now, we will run this playbook. The playbook can be run using ansible-playbook command.

The playbook ran successfully and also stated that the status of the tasks is changed. Now, if you look at the directory you will see all the folders and file created automatically using Ansible on Target Host (Windows) machine.

So, this is just a small example to make you understand how you can use Ansible to communicate with any target host and make changes automatically. Apart from this small task you can use Ansible to automate Infrastructure, Applications, Security, Networks, Cloud and Containers. Hope, this blog helps you to have an understanding of how to create host file, playbook and how to run the playbook.

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