Templates are processed by the Jinja2 templating language (http://jinja.pocoo.org/docs/) - documentation on the template formatting can be found in the Template Designer Documentation (http://jinja.pocoo.org/docs/templates/). Six additional variables can be used in templates: ansible_managed (configurable via the defaults section of ansible.cfg) contains a string which can be used to describe the template name, host, modification time of the template file and the owner uid, template_host contains the node name of the template’s machine, template_uid the owner, template_path the absolute path of the template, template_fullpath is the absolute path of the template, and template_run_date is the date that the template was rendered. Note that including a string that uses a date in the template will result in the template being marked ‘changed’ each time.
| parameter | required | default | choices | comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| backup | no | no |
| Create a backup file including the timestamp information so you can get the original file back if you somehow clobbered it incorrectly. |
| dest | yes | Location to render the template to on the remote machine. |
||
| force | no | yes |
| the default is yes, which will replace the remote file when contents are different than the source. If no, the file will only be transferred if the destination does not exist. |
| group | no | Name of the group that should own the file/directory, as would be fed to chown. |
||
| mode | no | Mode the file or directory should be. For those used to /usr/bin/chmod remember that modes are actually octal numbers (like 0644). Leaving off the leading zero will likely have unexpected results. As of version 1.8, the mode may be specified as a symbolic mode (for example, u+rwx or u=rw,g=r,o=r). |
||
| owner | no | Name of the user that should own the file/directory, as would be fed to chown. |
||
| selevel | no | s0 | Level part of the SELinux file context. This is the MLS/MCS attribute, sometimes known as the range. _default feature works as for seuser. |
|
| serole | no | Role part of SELinux file context, _default feature works as for seuser. |
||
| setype | no | Type part of SELinux file context, _default feature works as for seuser. |
||
| seuser | no | User part of SELinux file context. Will default to system policy, if applicable. If set to _default, it will use the user portion of the policy if available. |
||
| src | yes | Path of a Jinja2 formatted template on the Ansible controller. This can be a relative or absolute path. |
||
| unsafe_writes (added in 2.2)
| no |
Normally this module uses atomic operations to prevent data corruption or inconsistent reads from the target files, sometimes systems are configured or just broken in ways that prevent this. One example are docker mounted files, they cannot be updated atomically and can only be done in an unsafe manner.
This boolean option allows ansible to fall back to unsafe methods of updating files for those cases in which you do not have any other choice. Be aware that this is subject to race conditions and can lead to data corruption.
|
||
| validate | no | None | The validation command to run before copying into place. The path to the file to validate is passed in via '%s' which must be present as in the example below. The command is passed securely so shell features like expansion and pipes won't work. |
# Example from Ansible Playbooks - template: src=/mytemplates/foo.j2 dest=/etc/file.conf owner=bin group=wheel mode=0644 # The same example, but using symbolic modes equivalent to 0644 - template: src=/mytemplates/foo.j2 dest=/etc/file.conf owner=bin group=wheel mode="u=rw,g=r,o=r" # Copy a new "sudoers" file into place, after passing validation with visudo - template: src=/mine/sudoers dest=/etc/sudoers validate='visudo -cf %s'
Note
Since Ansible version 0.9, templates are loaded with trim_blocks=True.
Note
Also, you can override jinja2 settings by adding a special header to template file. i.e. #jinja2:variable_start_string:'[%' , variable_end_string:'%]', trim_blocks: False which changes the variable interpolation markers to [% var %] instead of {{ var }}. This is the best way to prevent evaluation of things that look like, but should not be Jinja2. raw/endraw in Jinja2 will not work as you expect because templates in Ansible are recursively evaluated.
For more information on what this means please read Core Modules
For help in developing on modules, should you be so inclined, please read Community Information & Contributing, developing_test_pr and Developing Modules.
© 2012–2016 Michael DeHaan
© 2016 Red Hat, Inc.
Licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3.
https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/template_module.html