// Tutorial //

What is Ansible?

Published on February 25, 2021 · Updated on February 25, 2021
Default avatar

By Erika Heidi

Developer Advocate

What is Ansible?

Ansible is an open source configuration management tool that provides a minimalist server automation framework based on YAML definitions. Its simplified infrastructure requirements and accessible syntax helped make Ansible one of the most popular configuration management tools to date.

Unlike most tools in the same category, Ansible doesn’t require specialized software to be installed on remote nodes. A control machine is set up with the Ansible software, which then communicates with the nodes via standard SSH, using Python to execute remote instructions.

Ansible provides a large collection of built-in modules to facilitate automating common server tasks such as installing packages, creating and managing users, manipulating files and permissions, and managing services.

To learn more about Ansible, you can refer to the following resources:

Thanks for learning with the DigitalOcean Community. Check out our offerings for compute, storage, networking, and managed databases.

Learn more about us


Want to learn more? Join the DigitalOcean Community!

Join our DigitalOcean community of over a million developers for free! Get help and share knowledge in our Questions & Answers section, find tutorials and tools that will help you grow as a developer and scale your project or business, and subscribe to topics of interest.

Sign up now
About the authors
Default avatar

Developer Advocate

Dev/Ops passionate about open source, PHP, and Linux.

Still looking for an answer?

Ask a questionSearch for more help

Was this helpful?
 
Leave a comment
Leave a comment...

This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!