When automating your data center infrastructure, it is important to understand the various technologies that are available to you, as well as how the individual technologies can be used in combination to better suit the individual needs of your operation. For example, both Ansible and Docker exist as solutions for the automation of server software Read More >
Ansible Tutorials
Ansible Automation

Ansible IT automation software allows you to manage software deployments to remote servers with human-readable configuration files. InMotion Hosting recommends several ways to use Ansible.
For small deployments, we recommend our free Ansible Control Node. This is a bare bones Linux container completely separate from the servers it will manage. The Ansible Control Node is included with your first purchase of our Cloud Server or Bare Metal Dedicated Server.
For larger deployments, such as a Private Cloud to run multiple Cloud or Bare Metal servers, we recommend setting up a dedicated Cloud Server or using a virtual machine (VM) in your Private Cloud as your Ansible Deployment Server. This is a more advanced scenario for System Administrators. Get started with our guide to Install Ansible on a Linux Server.
For free Ansible support, please ask a question in our Community Support Center. For paid support, please contact our Managed Hosting team.
For bug reports and related issues, please let us know on our InMotion Github page.
InMotion Hosting Ansible Catalog
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Using Ansible Modules
One of the ways Ansible executes specific tasks is through the use of modules. Modules are discrete units of code that can be used in an Ansible playbook or directly from a command-line interface. By leveraging Ansible modules you can easily manage and maintain your Ansible deployments. In this article, we will outline how Ansible Read More >
Ansible vs Terraform
When trying to determine what software solution best suits your needs, it can be difficult to sort through all of the available options. Oftentimes the differences between two given software solutions are not immediately apparent. In this article, we will outline the differences between two popular open-source software management solutions, Ansible and Terraform. While both Read More >
Using ad-hoc Commands in Ansible
While writing Ansible playbooks allows you to pre-plan automated software deployments and other tasks, you may find yourself in need of simpler commands that allow you to do less complex tasks such as powering down servers or managing users. For these tasks, you may want to use ad-hoc commands. In this article, we will outline Read More >
Creating your First WordPress Site with Ansible
A low-cost High-Availability Cloud Server is one of the best ways to host websites and other web apps. However, deploying the software can be time-consuming depending on your experience level. Luckily, with our included Ansible Control Node and WordPress UltraStack Ansible Playbook, you can deploy a WordPress site with all necessary dependencies easily. In this Read More >
WordPress UltraStack Tutorial
As we start to expand on our Ansible Catalog, we are excited to provide our Ansible Playbook for deploying WordPress to the Open Source community! We have taken great care in developing our curated WordPress-UltraStack-Ansible playbook to allow system administrators, web developers, and content designers to easily deploy WordPress. To simplify the process of getting Read More >
Maintaining Your Deployments in GitHub
In this article, we will outline the process of using Git to handle versioning a repository and keeping a copy on a GitWeb provider as a backup, or for sharing. This article assumes that you have already received a copy of the WordPress UltraStack playbook, and want to retain custom changes to the playbook by Read More >
Using Git to Manage your Workflow
“Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.” https://git-scm.com/ Choosing a workflow Part of what has made Git so common is that it is able to support a nearly limitless amount of workflows. From the extreme organizational complexity Read More >
Ansible Galaxy and Prebuilt Playbooks
Rather than create our roles from scratch, we’ll use community submitted roles from Ansible Galaxy for use in our playbook. You can think of Ansible Galaxy as a community repository for Ansible Roles. As any person or team is able to contribute, it is important to use curated playbooks that are well-tested. This ensures that Read More >
End to End Guide to Deploy WordPress UltraStack Using Ansible and Git
The InMotion WordPress UltraStack is a curated set of services and configurations developed to provide what we believe is the best way to run a WordPress stack. We took the standard LAMP stack and extended it to also leverage Nginx as a caching layer and then used Redis to serve as an object cache. Previously, Read More >