How to manage cron tasks with ansible

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1

Hi

I am very newbie with ansible. I have been learning ansible few weeks. I understand basics of ansible. However and maybe this for you is simply trivial, I don’t know how to manage the cron tasks of my servers.

Until now, I have tested ansible to make a automatic setup of LEMP stack in ubuntu servers (I mean install nginx, php-fpm, mysql) and also I have used ansible to setup automatically things like ntp, update system package, etc. Definitely thins there are common in most of servers.

But with crons is different. I just don’t know how to tell ansible the difference between

ubuntu server 1
ubuntu server 2

and setup different crontab (for root user ).

I have difficulty to decide how to approach this scenario.

Creating different templates?

cron.ubuntu_1.j2
cron.ubuntu_2.j2

stored in files folder?

Having individual playboooks? But these has no sense.

I really don’t know how to do it. My real scenario is

a bunch of centos physical servers
a buchf of ubuntu virtual private servers

Anyone have any idea?

Thanks!

2

Using variables for differences between systems can be desirable, but it is often better to incorporate cron behaviors into the automation of a particular application or system service.

Using the “cron” module or cron.d files with “template” are usually a better way than templating down the system crontab in one fell swoop.

3

Hi Michael

Firstable, thanks for reply.

I am not totally sure if I understand completely what you are telling me. Let me expose a short scenario, maybe other people like me who are newbie on ansible some day find this.

We have two servers, A and B, both pertain to a webservers group. We want to add some cron task in B server but no in A server.

Where part of ansible will be responsible for the decision to add the cron task in A or B? Example

# cat roles/cron/tasks/main.yml

4

For just one host…

# cat roles/cron/tasks/main.yml