Been using Ansible for a little over a week now. I’ve messed around with Chef a bit but I’m not a coder and don’t know anything about YAML so basically a beginner when it comes to this stuff.
Really starting to like Ansible. Took me less than an hour to have it installed, add a couple test nodes, and start issuing ad hoc commands. That says a lot. Within a couple days I had YAML figured out and made a simple functional playbook. Now I am learning how to split up files in to tasks/handlers/templates/variables. The template stuff is going to take me awhile longer but I already have some pretty practical playbooks so very impressed with the easy learning curve and power of it so far.
My only real complaint is the documentation. A bit lacking in places. I would like to see more examples organized by topic as well. Yes I am googling and finding lots of examples on github but you can’t really search by topic doing it that way. Seems to me this project could use a wiki that people can contribute to no?!
Everyone's docs can always be improved. While we get lots of "the
documentation is awesome" comments, I get even more "documentation is
way better than XYZ's Wiki" comments.
The Wiki is not the answer.
That being said, different people learn in different ways. The best
way for us to understand what needs to be documented better is to hear
it, and to present those things in different ways
so people CAN learn them differently.
There are a few things we are going to do short term
(A) add a glossary section, linking to all the keywords
(B) rewrite the best practices section, showing how to put it all
together, and have a nicer example playbook to point people to on
github showing that organization
I think that will address most concerns.
I don't like Wikis as they grow unmaintained and can be edited rather
haphazardly -- we review all of our documentation.
We also have a lot of sample playbooks in the resources section that
I'd recommend looking over.
This list (Michael in particular 8-)) has been very responsive (thanks!), but I could've spent less time on some things.
Off the top of my head, if I may add to this thread some things that I've run into before I forget:
- Download and Documentation section @ ansible.cc should have both; missing clear download info for non-developers looking for latest release tarball.
- RPM building
- variables such as stdout_lines
- yum module - it seems you can install RPMs that are local files (i.e. not from a repo) but it's not documented under the module.
I personally would like to see more examples. I think the really basic stuff is covered ok but I am hitting a bit of a wall after that. Specifically making calls to task/handler files. Also would like to see a LOT more examples of working with variables and templates and variables in templates. Just providing a link to the junja website doesn’t cut it for me. I have to wade through too many details on that site. Not even sure how much of that applies to ansible anyways.