Is it possible to append a large amount of text to a file using Ansible

+1 vote

An application creates a lot of definitions in /etc/services. To keep services file handy with all these definitions is good practice so that we can just pipe them into /etc/services like this:

cp /etc/services /etc/services.stock
cat /path/to/build/services >> /etc/services

It works, but it's not idempotent i.e. running these commands repeatedly will cause the services file to get appended with the info again.

As I work through our Ansible playbooks, I'm trying to figure out how to do this. I could so something like this:

- command: "cat /path/to/build/services >> /etc/services"

but I don't want it to run every time I run the playbook.

Another option is to do something like this:

- name: add services
  lineinfile: 
    state: present
    insertafter: EOF
    dest: /etc/services
    line: "{{ item }}"
  with_items:
   - line 1
   - line 2
   - line 3
   - line 4
   - ...

It's not that fast, as it does each line individually.

Is there any other way around? Templates are not of that much help.

can anyone help me with this?

Thanks.

Jul 30, 2018 in Ansible by Damon Salvatore
• 5,980 points
14,618 views

1 answer to this question.

0 votes

Here is concept which you can follow.

blockinfile is a native, idempotent module to ensure a specified set of lines is present (absent) in a file.

Example:

- name: add services
  blockinfile: 
    state: present
    insertafter: EOF
    dest: /etc/services
    marker: "<!-- add services ANSIBLE MANAGED BLOCK -->"
    content: |
      line 1
      line 2
      line 3

I hope the above information will be helpful for you.

answered Jul 30, 2018 by Atul
• 10,240 points

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