---
title: "How to Create an Ansible Playbook"
description: "Now that we know more about how Ansible works behind the scenes, let’s create our first Ansible Playbook! The examples in this section were performed on a Linux Distribution, though the steps..."
url: https://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/edu/ansible/create-an-ansible-playbook/
date: 2020-01-15
modified: 2020-04-30
author: "InMotion Hosting Contributor"
categories: ["Ansible Tutorials"]
type: post
lang: en
---

# How to Create an Ansible Playbook

Now that we know more about how [Ansible](https://www.inmotionhosting.com/ansible) works behind the scenes, let’s create our first Ansible Playbook! The examples in this section were performed on a Linux Distribution, though the steps should be nearly the same on most Operating Systems.

The first step in creating your first Ansible Playbook is to create a working directory to house it, and entering the directory:

```
$ mkdir my-playbook
$ cd my-playbook
```

We recommend that you use some type of version control software (VCS), though this is optional. For our example, we will use Git to track revision history:

```
$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in /home//my-playbook/.git/
```

## Creating an Ansible Inventory

Now we can start to define our inventory for this playbook. There are multiple strategies for managing an Ansible Inventory, though we’ll use a single static inventory file for simplicity. If you are managing an inventory that changes frequently, you may want to consider using a Dynamic Inventory instead.

Using your preferred text editor, create a file named ‘inventory’ in the ‘my-playbook‘ directory we created earlier and add the following:

```
# inventory.yml
lamp:
    www1:
```

In the above example of an inventory file, we are deploying to a single host that we are referring to by its IP address or domain name.

## Creating a Task

Create a site.yml file and put the following in it:

```
# site.yml
- hosts: all

  tasks:
    - name: Install packages
      package:
        name: '{{ packages }}'
        state: present
```

## Defining Variables

Ansible allows for configuring provided variables as well as defining your own. The following sources expand on the possible configuration options, as well as defining your own variables:

- Configuration Reference | [ansible.com](https://ansible.com/)
- Using Variables | [ansible.com](https://ansible.com/)

### Group Variables (group_vars)

In the above example of a plaintext inventory, the hosts are within a group, one of which is ‘’. If you have a need to define a common set of variables for any host that is in a certain group, you may assign variables by creating the ‘group_vars/’ directory, and within this directory you create the ‘webservers’ file:

```
# group_vars/webservers.yml

ansible_connection: /bin/python3
```

### Host Variables (host_vars)

Following our example of an inventory file, not only can we set group-specific variables, though we can set host-specific variables. This allows for us to set additional variables for a specific host that compliment or modify the variables for the group the host is assigned to.

You may assign variables to hosts by creating the ‘host_vars/’ directory, and within this directory you create the ‘**www1.example.com**’ file:

```
# host_vars/www1.yml
ansible_host: domain.tld
ansible_user: my_user
```

## Running your first playbook

```
$ ansible-playbook main.yml -i inventory
```