CfgMgmtCamp 2026: Ansible Core 2.19

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CfgMgmtCamp 2026: Ansible Core 2.19

This post is part of a series of talks presented at CfgMgmtCamp 2026. Please see CfgMgmtCamp for all other talks.

A Love Letter to Ansible Core 2.19

Speaker: Matt Davis

Slides: Presentation

Video: YouTube

Nervous about upgrading to Ansible Core 2.19? Learn how the revamped template engine and error handling in Ansible’s latest release will make your life easier from a self-proclaimed Ansible lover.

Don’t Fear the Jinja - Beyond the Handlebars with Ansible

Speaker: Matt Davis

Slides: Presentation

Challenge: Forum Post

Video: YouTube

Jinja’s tricky. Few things can so quickly evoke chutzpah, fear, and regret in the soul of a playbook author; often all at once! Join Ansible Core architect nitzmahone for a light-hearted exploration of some Jinja anti-patterns, and a dive into powerful new Jinja features enabled in recent Ansible Core releases. Learn to confidently embed handlebars in your automation without going “over the handlebars”.

Talk Notes

Is a playbook a Jinja template?

  • Common misconception, but no. Template ability implemented by each keyword.
  • Special sauce over Jinja for Ansible features
    • Automatic lazy template-on-fetch.
    • Native mode (Core team contributed to Jinja upstream project for enhancements to this). Native mode is by default

Jinja Template Behaviour in Ansible

  • Only run on the Ansible controller.
  • Should not have side effects
    • May be evaluated more than once. Can be done during a best effort scenario. Can sometimes happen when a debugger is being used.
  • Lazy recursive templating: Templates are not evaluated until referenced. Laziness was vastly improved in 2.19.

Jinja macros:

  • Easier to write than (Python) Jinja plugins.
  • Building CI CD pipeline with Ansible.

Ansible Style Guide and guidelines for compatibility with newer versions of Ansible community package/ansible-core (Ansible 12/ansible-core 2.19 and above)

Speaker: Kostiantyn Volenbovskyi

Slides: Presentation

Forum Survey: Survey on various Ansible Style questions

Video: YouTube

There are several Ansible Style Guides and I would like to present a different one based on existing ones with certain guidelines added and changed. It covers topics such as list of dictionaries as recommended structure for “more complex” variables, usage of set_fact, etc.

Check out the other sessions at CfgMgmtCamp 2026 using the links below:

Here are links to all the talks on YouTube as well as related forum discussions:

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CfgMgmtCamp 2026: Community and Contributor Summit
CfgMgmtCamp 2026: Ansible Ecosystem
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There’s an ongoing survey by @volenbovsky for his style guide talk: Survey on various Ansible Style questions (CfgMgmtCamp follow-up)

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Hey @felixfontein - Thanks! I’ll add that to the main body.