Ansible tips&tricks

In this site you will find much of the documentation that I collected over the years. This is by no means a "We say so" document.
I have worked in a number of organizations implementing ansible and
automation platform, this is my personal view on "How I would do this".

Yust writing all knowledge down helps me to burn it into my braincells. I hope you enjoy this as much as I did writing and learning it.
Enjoy..

logoWilco Folkers

General

GitOps automation explaned

Always wanted to know about GitOps?
Read on..

Build an enterprise grade lab on your local computer

Learn how to setup a lab that can test your code like it was in the enterprise, just follow these steps.

Build a homelab to run it all

Follow me as I build a homelab on a mini PC using Proxmox.

Configuration As Code

Config as Code automation platform 2.4

Everything and more you need to know about config as code for ansible automation platform 2.4. never lose your configuration again!

Config as Code Automation Platform 2.5

Description of a possible solution for configuration as code for ansible automation platform 2.5.

Config as Code Automation Platform 2.6 (!Read the message)

Description of a possible solution for configuration as code for ansible automation platform 2.6.

Ansible

Example EDA projects

Description of a functional EDA project in combination with configuration as code.

Inventory construction documentation

Curious how to build an inventory?
Here it is...

Naming convention Ansible

What's to know about naming conventions, I've got mine here

Infrastructure as Code

Howto create infrastructure as Code, a guide to buildingblocks

Testplan template (not testing playbook, but the result!)

When you are confident about your code (linting, syntax_check), are you just as sure about the result?

Optimizing ansible playbooks

Some correct syntax in ansible may take a long time to execute, check here for optimizations

Trigger a job_template from curl in AAP

Why go through the trouble creating webhooks, when it can be so simple..

This site is (since 01-01-2026), hosted on virtual machines, created with ansible code, running on automation platform. The site is now running on 3 linux containers(LXC on proxmox) with nginx, load balanced in a pool through a nginx proxy.
The whole setup is created using ansible and the site is deployed through a gitlab pipeline.
All in line with the automation principals.
The playbooks used for this installation, will be added later.

This site is still a work in progress, check us regularly for updates.. There is much to be added..

version:
  updated: 14-04-2026
  update:
    Added certificate based login configuration
    See: ansible key security page

  updated: 02-04-2026
  update:
    Updated the side menu structure

  updated: 24-03-2026
  update:
    Updated my server to release 2.6-6 and retested the full configuration as code.
    All code here is still valid.

  updated: 16-03-2026
  update:
    Added a more comprehensive example to the EDA project.  

  updated: 12-03-2026
  update:
    A solution to the team role mapping in automation hub added.  
    The infra.aap_configuration collection still fails without error, additionally
    role mapping on instance groups is also not applied, added a workaround for this also. 
    but the workaround does the trick.

  updated: 11-03-2026
  update:
    Added a new example for eda, using grafana alertmanager.