I’ve been digging through the documentation and have run into a wall in terms of Ansible’s ability to manage the contents of configuration files. This might have something to do with search engine results returning articles on how to configure Ansible itself, so I figured I’d ask.
What I found:
-
A tips and tricks article that describes the use of Jinja, ini_file, lineinfile, and a few regex tricks
-
A reasonable GitHub gist or a StackExchange answer for editing pure json files, but neither are part of the basic library
-
An xml module
Things I didn’t find:
-
HOCON management
-
support for nginx files
-
shockingly, no support for modifying YAML files beyond lineinfile
-
A consolidated library or standard for this kind of management
Most of the support I’ve found relies upon a variable name being unique between all contexts, and is particularly troublesome if you have to insert a value into something like thirdentry/interface/host/value.
What would be optimal would be a module that takes a format as a parameter and allows the administrator to edit the contents in a standard format. I don’t think that there are any config formats that can’t be represented as dictionaries and arrays. Is something like that under consideration?
If not, is there a place where config file management is described as a whole?