Validate an Ansible Playbook Before Merging to Main

Problem/Feature Description

A DevOps team is adopting Ansible for infrastructure configuration management. A junior engineer has written a playbook to configure a web server fleet and has submitted it for review before merging to main. The team lead wants a thorough validation pass performed on the playbook and a written report of all findings.

The playbook installs nginx, copies a configuration file, and starts the service. It also downloads a binary from the internet and runs a post-install check command. The team's standard is that every playbook passes all validation gates before merge.

Your job is to perform the full validation workflow and produce a report documenting every step, every tool run, and every finding.

Output Specification

Produce validation_report.md documenting:

• Every validation step performed in order
• The command run for each step
• Findings from each step (or confirmation it passed)
• A final pass/fail summary

Input Files

The following files are provided as inputs. Extract them before beginning.

=============== FILE: playbooks/configure_webserver.yml ===============

• name: Configure web servers hosts: webservers become: yes

  vars: nginx_port: 80 download_url: https://releases.example.com/tool-v1.2.3-linux-amd64.tar.gz

  tasks:

  • name: Install nginx apt: name: nginx state: present update_cache: yes

  • name: Copy nginx configuration template: src: templates/nginx.conf.j2 dest: /etc/nginx/nginx.conf owner: root group: root

  • name: Download tool binary get_url: url: "{{ download_url }}" dest: /tmp/tool.tar.gz validate_certs: false

  • name: Extract tool binary unarchive: src: /tmp/tool.tar.gz dest: /usr/local/bin remote_src: yes

  • name: Start and enable nginx service: name: nginx state: started enabled: yes

  • name: Check nginx status command: systemctl status nginx

  • name: Verify tool installation command: /usr/local/bin/tool --version

=============== FILE: inventory/hosts.ini =============== [webservers] web01.example.com web02.example.com web03.example.com