Ansible Reboot Module: Safely Reboot Servers & Wait for Recovery — Video Tutorial

How to reboot remote hosts with Ansible? I'm going to show you a live Playbook with some simple Ansible code. I'm Luca Berton and welcome to today's episode of Ansible Pilot. Ansible reboot remote hosts Today we're talking about the Ansible module `reboot`. The full name is `ansible.builtin.reboot` which means is part of the collection of modules "builtin" with ansible and shipped with `ansible-core`. This module is pretty stable and out for years and supports a large variety of operating systems. The purpose is to reboot a remote machine, wait for it to go down, come back up, and respond to commands. For Windows targets, use the `ansible.windows.win_reboot` module instead. Parameters - reboot_timeout _integer_ - 600 - msg _string_ - "Reboot initiated by Ansible" - reboot_command _string_ - "[OS specific]" - pre_reboot_delay _integer_ - 0 - post_reboot_delay _integer_ - 0 - test_command string - "whoami" - boot_time_command string - "cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/boot_id" This module has not required parameters but some of them might are nice to know. Let me summarize the most useful parameters. The "reboot_timeout" defines how much time to expect before a machine returns up & running. The real timeout is double because of the process of reboot and test command success. The first step in the reboot process is to print a message to all the logged users. You could keep the default "Reboot initiated by Ansible" or customize using the "msg" parameter. Secondly is going to execute the reboot command, OS-specific. If you need a specific one, please customize the "reboot_command" parameter. You could define also some extra delay time using the "pre_reboot_delay" or "post_reboot_delay" integer. Both default to zero. Once rebooted the target host Ansible is going to verify the workstation fully working using a test command. The default is `whoami`, but you could customize using the "test_command" parameter. This module could return also the amount of time indeed for bootstrap process reading throw kernel, specifically `/proc/sys/kernel/random/boot_id`. ## Playbook Let's jump into a real-life playbook on how to reboot remote hosts with Ansible Playbook. - reboot.yml ```yaml --- - name: reboot module Playbook hosts: all become: true tasks: - name: reboot host(s) ansible.builtin.reboot: msg: "reboot by Ansible" pre_reboot_delay: 5 post_reboot_delay: 10 test_command: "whoami" ``` [code with ❤️ in GitHub](https://github.com/lucab85/ansible-pilot/tree/master/reboot%20remote%20hosts) Conclusion Now you know how to reboot remote Linux hosts with Ansible. Basic Reboot ```yaml - name: Reboot the server ansible.builtin.reboot: become: true ``` The module automatically waits for the host to come back online. Reboot with Custom Timeouts ```yaml - name: Reboot with extended timeout ansible.builtin.reboot: reboot_timeout: 600 # Wait up to 10 min for reboot connect_timeout: 30 # SSH