Introduction Recently, I’ve introduced Pi-hole into my house, both for its ad-blocking capabilities, and to act as a slightly more powerful DNS server than my current home router, a FRITZ!Box 3490. Although that router looks jazzy as anything, there is no facility to add custom DNS records. I prefer to run my home docker containers on subdomains, rather than on a path, so having the ability to create internal DNS records is essential.

What is Ansible? Ansible is an open source automation tool, which facilitates configuration management, application deployment and task automation. A complex multi-step process can be automated and run with a simple command from your workstation: ansible-playbook task.yml. A key word for Ansible is ‘ensure’. Ansible will work to ensure that configuration / tasks are run. If a task completes without changing any settings, it is ‘ok’. Otherwise, it was ‘changed’ or sometimes ‘failed’ (which is not always a Bad Thing™)