Ansible at scale - working with multiple environments

Demo repository

To reproduce:

Create three Ubuntu Server 24.04 machines or later.
On your developer PC (where you will be running ansible-playbook from), create hosts entries in /etc/hosts for the machines pointing the hostnames from the hosts file to the relevant IPs.
Configure SSH key authentication on the machines or be lazy like me and enable root password login by modifying /etc/ssh/sshd_config, setting PermitRootLogin yes.
Set the password of the root users in each machine to the same password (note: NOT recommended for production! This is where using keys becomes convenient and safer).
On your developer PC run ansible-playbook -i environments/ubuntu playbooks/ubuntu.yml --ask-pass and type in the root password you just configured (leave out --ass-pass if you are using keys).

(Please note that the html_root in the group_vars/all/main.yml file is not actually used - but easily could be.)

Congratulations, you now have three apache servers!

Please refer to the Medium blog post for further details.