APT and packages with interactive configuraton?

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1

Hello,

I am trying to set up Postfix on a Debian 12 web server according to this guide. About halfway through the article the author installs Postfix via sudo apt-get install postfix -y, which opens an interactive configuration wizard before the package is installed.

I have not been able to find anything the the documentation of ansible.builtin.apt for answering these interactive questions. Is there a way, or am I out of luck?

2

@HiPhish
Hi, try this:

- ansible.builtin.apt:
    name: postfix
    state: present
  environment:
    DEBIAN_FRONTEND: noninteractive

The noninteractive means:

This is the anti-frontend. It never interacts with you at all, and makes the default answers be used for all questions. It might mail error messages to root, but that’s it; otherwise it is completely silent and unobtrusive, a perfect frontend for automatic installs. If you are using this front-end, and require non-default answers to questions, you will need to preseed the debconf database; see the section below on Unattended Package Installation for more details.
https://manpages.debian.org/jessie/debconf-doc/debconf.7.en.html#Frontends

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3

You can get and set the answers before installing postfix using the ansible.builtin.debconf module, for example to get all the questions and what has been set (a * indicates a modified answer) after postfix has been installed:

debconf-show postfix
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4

Thanks, debconf is the mechanism was looking for. It was impossible to find anything useful online searching for “wizard” or “configuration”, but searching for debconf gave me the results I needed.

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