How to easily switch between ansible versions

Lately I’ve run into issues with different versions of ansible (1.9 handling async better, 2.x having more modules and handling IPv6 better) and having to test playbooks and roles against different versions to make sure they work. TO make life easier I put this little function in my .bashrc to switch back and forth between ansible versions. It checks out the specified version from github if it needs to, and switches over to it (just for that terminal, not the system). Usage is straight forward ansible_switch <branch> , i.e. ansible_switch 2.1  (or whatever branch you want, here is a list of all branches).

It is currently limited to stable branches, but you can change line 6 from stable- to whatever you want (or remove the prefix completely). If you have a github account you also may want to change from https to ssh by using the git@github.com:ansible/ansible.git checkout URL.

 

Ansible tasks to reboot a server if required

A quick one today.  The following ansible tasks check if a server needs to be rebooted, reboots it, and then waits for it to come back online. Easy to fire off during a maintenance after updating packages.

 

Convert configuration files to ansible templates

I’ve been playing around with ansible a lot lately, and I noticed that while changing stuff from “installed and configured manually” to “installed and configured by ansible” I was running into quite a few configuration files that needed to be manually turned into templates. It can be quite tedious to replace values in a configuration file with placeholders and put all those placeholders in a .yml file with default values.
Automating this is something I would have typically done in perl, but since I wanted to learn more about using regex in bash I decided to have a go at it in bash using regex and ${BASH_REMATCH}

The script takes a configuration file and spits out an ansible template, as well as the variable definitions you will need to add to your defaults/main.yml or vars/main.yml

The whole script is a bit to long to post here, but the interesting part is:

(You can download the full script here ansible_template.sh).

You can use regular expressions in a [[ ]] with =~ (e.g. if [[ “boot” =~ ^b ]]), and you can access the result of the regular expression by using ( ) to mark what parts of the result to store and access them via $BASH_REMATCH (comparable to how you would do it for other languages). Here I am parsing out anything that looks like a key=value from the configfile (with multiple possible separators) and storing the results in BASH_REMATCH[1] and BASH_REMATCH[2]

Usage of the script is pretty straightforward. you give it a prefix for the variable names (so you don’t end up with multiple roles all using a common variable name like “port”), and either a local or remote file to work with, and it spits out something like this:

There a tons of different configuration file formats out there so this script won’t work perfectly 100% of the time, but it does do quite well and reduces the manually copy&pasting to a minimum.