.. _playbook_guide_index:

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Using Ansible playbooks
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.. note::

    **Making Open Source More Inclusive**

    Red Hat is committed to replacing problematic language in our code, documentation, and web properties. We are beginning with these four terms: master, slave, blacklist, and whitelist. We ask that you open an issue or pull request if you come upon a term that we have missed. For more details, see `our CTO Chris Wright's message <https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/making-open-source-more-inclusive-eradicating-problematic-language>`_.

Welcome to the Ansible playbooks guide.
Playbooks are automation blueprints, in ``YAML`` format, that Ansible uses to deploy and configure nodes in an inventory.
This guide introduces you to playbooks and then covers different use cases for tasks and plays, such as:

* Executing tasks with elevated privileges or as a different user.
* Using loops to repeat tasks for items in a list.
* Delegating playbooks to execute tasks on different machines.
* Running conditional tasks and evaluating conditions with playbook tests.
* Using blocks to group sets of tasks.

You can also learn how to use Ansible playbooks more effectively by using collections, creating reusable files and roles, including and importing playbooks, and running selected parts of a playbook with tags.

.. toctree::
   :maxdepth: 2

   playbooks_intro
   playbooks
   playbooks_execution
   playbooks_advanced_syntax
   complex_data_manipulation
