Understanding Templates

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Templating is a very nice feature of Ansible. It solves the common need to change multiple lines in a file based on a given situation. In this lesson, we'll learn more about templates, variables, and how they combine to make our lives so much easier.

Ansible Templates

Templates are just plain files. Much like you would copy a configuration file from your local machine to the remote machine, templates perform in a similar way. There are two main differences between templates and files though. As you might expect, for templates, we use the “template” module instead of the “copy” module. Secondly, templates replace parts of the template file with the values of variables.

Ansible uses the Python template engine called Jinja2, which you can read up about at the Jinja project homepage for syntax details.

Ansible Variables

Variables can come from a lot of different places, including automatically from the inventory, defaults, groups, along with values we explicitly set. We'll keep things simple in this lesson and only use variables we specify outright.

Variables are typically identified by double curly braces, like “” for example. You can put these curly braces in a lot of locations, either as we have been in some of our playbooks, and also in templates.

Use in Playbooks

To use templates, let's start things off simply with a template file. There's no purpose other than to illustrate how templates work. Save this as “template.j2” which ends in “j2” to represent Jinja 2.

# Regular Variable


# If / Else

Hyperdrive is enabled!


# Loop

First, we can see three elements. First is a regular find and replace. The next is a conditional if/else statement. Finally, we have a loop that repeats its contents for every item in a given variable list. Let's take a look at the playbook that supplies these variables.

---
- name: Demonstrate Templates
  hosts: all
  vars:
    regular_variable: Find and Replace
    use_hyperdrive: false
    mylist:
      - steak
      - butter
      - eggs
  tasks:

    - name: Upload Template
      template: src=template.j2 dest=~/template.output
      sudo: false

There we have it. The “vars” section provides the variables to the template automatically by Ansible. All we need to do is add a new task that utilizes the template module, provide it with a source file (our template), a destination, and all the rest is taken care of for us. The output after the template has been processed with those variables looks like this:

# Regular Variable
Find and Replace

# If / Else
Hyperdrive is not enabled

# Loop
I need to buy steak
I need to buy butter
I need to buy eggs

That's it on templates for now. In future posts, we'll see how precedence is calculated between all the levels of variable definition, how to access host variables, and more.