Posts related to scripting, mainly using shell scripts.
If you are into automation, you know the extra trouble with dealing with extra prompts when running any commands. I work in an environment where I have to run commands on multiple custom CLI(vendor built, for example, cisco CLI), so my option here is limited to expect to spawn the custom CLI and run commands […]
If you are using virsh/qemu for Virtual machine management, then there are many occasions when an administrator requires to run some commands on the guest VM. This is made very simple by “Quem-guest-agent.” This post demos two approaches to running a command in the Virtual guest machine. Prerequisite:(Teststed for Ubuntu Host and Guest Machine) Approach-1:
Simplifying VM Management: Executing Commands in Guest VMs using Virsh Read More »
If you create Virtual machines often and manually install the same tools repeatedly, this post is for you. Using ansible, I have written a simple playbook to create the virtual machines within seconds. The playbook would automatically install any desired software you want. The playbook would also run any command you would like to execute
An Amazingly fast way to create Virtual machines Read More »
Ansible is highly configurable and extendable for users. This post will show us how to use the callback plugins(shipped with ansible) to extend the playbooks. Ansible ships with many great callback plugins, a majority of these plugins are to control the output format of the playbook or to generate some sort of notification. Some examples
In ansible, we there are multiple ways to loop over a task. However, there are minimal ways to see what is happening in the background during the loop is getting executed. Sometimes, we want to display the loop output for each iteration to the user. 1. We use loop or with_items to iterate over the
How to print the output in during loop in ansible Read More »
Ansible is a great tool for automation; it has many ways to parse data from one form to another. For example, ansible ships with Jina2 filters and a bunch of ansible filters(as an extension to Jinja2 filters) for parsing the data. Using jinaj2 filters and ansible provided filters, we can do a lot of things;
Most modern applications use JSON and YAML for communication and configuration. However, there are many applications still using XML. If for some reason, you have to work with an XML file over bash, this post will cover many examples to extract the values from an XML file. Note that there are other alternatives to xmllint
In most cases, ansible inbuilt modules are enough to do the job. However, in some cases, it’s either highly complex or impossible to achieve the goal using ansible inbuilt modules. In such cases, many users write their scripts(Eg: bash or python,Etc.), which is fine for most cases. However, there are some downsides to using scripts.
For writing a custom module, we can use any language of our choice as long as it can return a JSON object. This post will write a simple custom module using a bash script. Typically the choice of language for writing a custom module is python; however, if, due to some reasons, you prefer to
Sometimes, it gets essential to prompt the user to confirm if the user is okay with the operations of the playbook. For example, if a playbook is going to perform an action that would cause a service impact, I would probably want to inform the user about the consequences and let him choose to abort
