In this chapter, we have taken our first steps with Ansible by installing locally and then, using Vagrant, launching a virtual machine to interact with. We learned about basic host inventory files and we used the Ansible command to execute a single task against our virtual machine.

We then looked at playbooks, starting out with a basic playbook that returned some information on our target before then progressing to a playbook that updates all of the installed operating system packages before installing and configuring the NTP service.

In the next chapter, we are going to take a look at other Ansible commands we can use.