Practical Ansible
A seven-part series taught on this lab
Written by Ali Shaikh and published on alishaikh.me. Each part does real administration work on the lab hosts, so you finish with skills, not just notes.
Part 1
Set Up an Ansible Practice Lab in Under 10 Minutes
Build the lab on Windows, macOS, Linux or in your browser, and run your first successful Ansible command.
Part 2
Understand Ansible Inventory, Facts and Ad-Hoc Commands
How Ansible decides which hosts to manage, and how to answer real operational questions without logging into a single machine.
Part 3
Write Your First Real Ansible Playbook: Baseline a Linux Server
Turn ad-hoc commands into a repeatable playbook, with check mode, diff mode and idempotence explained in plain language.
Part 4
Manage Users, SSH Keys and Sudo with Ansible
Onboard and offboard users across a group of servers with variables, loops and tags instead of hand edits.
Part 5
Deploy nginx with Ansible: Handlers, Reloads and Health Checks
Install nginx, deploy content and meet handlers: restarts that happen only when something actually changed.
Part 6
Ansible Templates and Safe Configuration Rollouts
Render per-host configuration from Jinja2 templates, validate before reload, and roll changes out one host at a time.
Part 7
Ansible Vault, Roles and the Road to Production
Encrypt secrets, refactor playbooks into roles, and understand what changes when the lab becomes real infrastructure.
New parts are announced on alishaikh.me, where you can subscribe for updates.