How it works...

The Ansible playbook is structured as a list of plays and each play targets a specific group of hosts (defined in the inventory file). Each play can have one or more tasks to execute against the hosts in this play. Each task runs a specific Ansible module that has a number of arguments. The general structure of the playbook is outlined in the following screenshot:

In the preceding playbook, we reference the variables that we defined in the previous recipe inside the {{ }} brackets. Ansible reads these variables from either group_vars or host_vars, and the module that we used in this playbook is the debug module, which displays as a custom message specified in the msg parameter to the Terminal output. The playbook run is shown here:

We use the -i option in the ansible-playbook command in order to point to the Ansible inventory file, which we will use as our source to construct our inventory.