Provision a Host with an Ansible Playbook

Configuration management means declaring the state you want and letting the tool make it so — idempotently. Write an Ansible playbook that provisions this host to a target state, then run it. The grader checks the resulting system state, not how you got there, but the intended path is a short playbook with three tasks.

Bring the host to this state:

1. A system user named deploy exists.

2. A directory /srv/deploy exists, owned by deploy.

3. A file /etc/deploy.conf exists and contains the line MANAGED_BY=ansible.

Ansible is installed. Because there's only this one box, run the playbook against localhost with a local connection — no SSH needed:

ansible-playbook -i 'localhost,' -c local site.yml

Use the user, file, and copy modules. Re-running your playbook should change nothing the second time — that's idempotence, the whole point of Ansible.