Upgrading all installed packages

To upgrade all installed packages, we will need to use the yum module again, but with a different parameter; in fact, we would use the following:

- name: Ensure we have last version of every package 
  yum: 
    name: "*" 
    state: latest 
  become: True 

As you can see, we have specified * as the package name (this stands for a wildcard to match all installed packages) and the state parameter is latest. This will upgrade all installed packages to the latest version available.

You may remember that, when we talked about the present state, we said that it was going to install the last available version. So, what's the difference between present and latest? present will install the latest version if the package is not installed, while if the package is already installed (no matter the version), it will go forward without making any change. latest will install the latest version if the package is not installed, and if the package is already installed, it will check whether a newer version is available, and, if it is, Ansible will update the package.