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About Luca Berton

Luca Berton is an Ansible automation expert, author of 8 Ansible books published by Apress and Leanpub including "Ansible for VMware by Examples" and "Ansible for Kubernetes by Example", and creator of the Ansible Pilot YouTube channel. He shares practical automation knowledge through tutorials, books, and video courses to help IT professionals and DevOps engineers master infrastructure automation.

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

How to reboot remote hosts with Ansible reboot module. Safely reboot servers, wait for recovery, set timeouts, and handle kernel updates with examples.

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Tutorial summary

What you'll learn

  • How to reboot remote hosts with Ansible?
  • Ansible reboot remote hosts
  • Parameters
  • Conclusion
  • Basic Reboot
  • Reboot with Custom Timeouts
  • Conditional Reboot
  • Reboot only if kernel was updated
  • Reboot only if RHEL needs it
  • Rolling Reboot (Zero Downtime)
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

About this tutorial

  • Author: Luca Berton
  • Difficulty: Advanced
  • Read time: 8 min
  • Category: troubleshooting

Topics covered

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