RedHat Demo Environment
Every Workshop attendant has his own demo environment.
Lab Diagram
The Lab environment consist of an Ansible control node (called ansible-1) and three Managed nodes (called node1, node2 and node3). All managed nodes are RHEL 8 hosts and are reachable password-less with SSH.
You will be logged in to the Ansible Control node with the Code editor Visual Studio Code. From here you will be writing all your playbooks and issuing all Ansible CLI commands.
Visual Studio Code
At its heart, Visual Studio Code is a code editor. Like many other code editors, VS Code adopts a common user interface and layout of an explorer on the left, showing all of the files and folders you have access to, and an editor on the right, showing the content of the files you have opened.
Tip
It is highly recommended to use the VS Code Editor to write your playbooks, it has automatic saving and syntax highlighting enabled!
If you want the real YAML challenge, try to write all your playbooks in the terminal/on the command-line. Expect to struggle at first with indentation, which leads to errors trying to run your playbooks.
Nevertheless, mastering to write Ansible playbooks without the help of a Code editor is the best possible way to really understand the YAML syntax. It doesn't take long and is highly rewarding.
Useful VScode configuration
Color theme for syntax highlighting
The Ansible extension supports syntax-highlighting for Ansible content. Depending on the used theme of VScode, this might not be shown correctly. Use the Default Dark+ theme.
Click on File in the top menu bar, click on Preferences and open Settings. Search for theme and choose the Dark+ (default dark) from the drop-down menu.
Terminal Scrollback
By default, scrollback of only 1000 lines is possible. If you need to scroll back further, you need to adjust this limit.
Click on File in the top menu bar, click on Preferences and open Settings. Search for scrollback and adjust the number to 10000 in the second configuration parameter (Terminal > Integrated: Scrollback).
