Okay, let's have a look at downloading roles from Ansible Galaxy.
Here we are at galaxy.ansible.com, the official Ansible Galaxy site.
I've signed in.
I would encourage you to create an account.
You can come in through a variety of identity federations.
I think I'm coming into Galaxy through my GitHub account.
If we come over here to the navigation bar,
we can see that collections are the largest or outermost unit of abstraction
when we talk about Ansible and packaging and code reuse.
As you can see,
these collections are basically repositories that
consist of any combination of modules, roles,
plugins, and dependencies.
So you see that you can pack an enormous amount of
functionality and build a solution as a collection.
We're at the fundamentals level, so we're barely doing roles.
We'll spend our time here in Ansible taking a look at the various roles.
So we'll go into roles, and immediately we'll want to start adjusting filters.
If we open up keywords, we can look based on taxonomic tags.
Now you see it looks like 80‑‑‑ There's quite a few roles here,
as you can see, and they're categorized in a different way.
Let's say we're looking at network‑related configuration management for Windows.
We'll probably want to throw in as a keyword Windows.
Ansible is a decidedly Linux world.
Let's take a look at all of the roles that have Windows in their name,
and we'll sort the list by download count or popularity.
You're going to see a lot of projects, popular projects too,
that are all clustered around a particular user.
There are some superstar users here.
When you go to look at a role,
you see an echo of how to install the role using ansible‑galaxy role install.
And then here,
this is where you get a separation between the wheat and the
chaff or the good and the not so good.
One reason why relying upon popularity is an important
guiding light here is because highly rated roles are going to
be ones that are fully documented.
So this one is explaining the parameters.
This is evidently a role that looks for reboot status.
Well, we can kind of do that with built‑in.
That's something else I'll mention.
You will find a variable amount of quality here in the Ansible Galaxy just like
you would at NuGet or PyPy or any kind of software index.
So look at ones that are fully documented.
Look at ones that quite a bit of traction.
They should always include an example of usage here.
So in this particular example, we're specifying the role by its full name.
And the way the namespace system works is that the role name is
going to start with the Ansible Galaxy user,
and then there'll be the name of the role.
And you'll need to specify that entire path when you
include the role in your playbooks, as you can see here.
Well,
let's step back and just doesn't really matter which
one we select for our example.
The point is learning how this works.
Here's one on managing Windows updates.
I guess that's fine for now.
So let's say we wanted to move forward on this role.
We can literally just go to our control server.