Creating a Job Template

A job template is a definition and set of parameters for running an Ansible job. Job templates are useful to execute the same job many times.

Step 1:

Select Templates

Step 2:

Click the icon, and select Job Template

Step 3:

Complete the form using the following values

Key	Value	Prompt on Launch
Name	Playbook-Demo
Description	Demo Job Template
JOB TYPE	Check	Ticked
INVENTORY	Workshop Inventory
PROJECT	Workshop Project
PLAYBOOK	playbooks/playbook-demo.yml
CREDENTIAL	Student Account
LIMIT	web	Checked

Step 4:

Click SAVE

Running a Job Template

Now that you’ve successfully created your Job Template, you are ready to launch it. Once you do, you will be prompted on what we asked it to prompt on launch.

We want to keep this to Check for now but its worth noting in the playbook we set

hosts: web

We can set the limit to just an individual box etc like node1 if we want to.

Click on Next

This gives us a preview of any changes we made and then click on Launch

Step 3:

Sit back, watch the magic happen

One of the first things you will notice is the summary section. This gives you details about your job such as who launched it, what playbook it’s running, what the status is, i.e. pending, running, or complete.

Next you will be able to see details on the play and each task in the playbook.

We see that there is a change on the Apache service, this is because when we ran our adhoc command we didnt set the service to start on reboot with the enable: true flag

Step 4:

Lets run the job template again but allow it to make changes.

Select Templates

You will now see the Template we created and we can launch it from here by selecting the icon

Change the Job Type to Run

Click Next and then Launch This will now execute but make the changes where needed.

Finally rerun the job template again in Check mode to see we are now in our desired state and no changed would be made.

End Result

You should now be familiar with how to run a Job Template in a check only mode to see if you are in your desired state as well as run it to make changes if needed. As well as how we can limit the run against a single machine or groups.