I want to roll out the latest Virtualbox onto my Ubuntu 18.04 servers via ansible. What I’ve managed so far is an installer-script that gets copied over to any host in the “virtualbox” hosts group (as per ansible hosts configuration file), then gets remotely executed and does this job. While this solution “gets the job done” it’s more of a “quick and dirty hack” and not really elegant. What’s the proper way to do this via pure ansible playbook code? E.g. I would like to write playbook code that determines the latest version of Virtualbox and then installs it, just like the bash script below does. Is there any way to do this? So my playbook so far looks like this: --- - hosts: virtualbox tasks: - name: Copy the repo file if needed copy: src: /home/admin/System_Configs/sources.list.d/18.04/virtualbox.list dest: /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ mode: 0644 owner: root group: root - name: Make sure repo keys are installed if needed apt_key: url: "https://www.virtualbox.org/download/{{ item }}.asc" state: present with_items: - oracle_vbox - oracle_vbox_2016 - name: Transfer the installer script copy: src: /home/admin/System_Configs/bin/virtualbox-installer.sh dest: /tmp/ mode: 0755 owner: root group: root - name: Execute the installer script shell: /tmp/virtualbox-installer.sh changed_when: False register: scriptoutput - debug: var={{ item }} with_items: - scriptoutput.stdout_lines … and the script that is called looks like this: #! /bin/bash cd /tmp rm /tmp/*.vbox-extpack >/dev/null 2>&1 wget -q -N https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/LATEST-STABLE.TXT VBOXVERSION=`cat /tmp/LATEST-STABLE.TXT` echo "Latest Virtualbox is: "$VBOXVERSION MAJORVERSION=`cat /tmp/LATEST-STABLE.TXT | cut -d. -f1,2` echo "Latest major release is: "$MAJORVERSION apt install virtualbox-$MAJORVERSION INSTALLEDVBOXVERSION=`VBoxManage --version | sed -r 's/([0-9])\.([0-9])\.([0-9]{1,2}).*/\1.\2.\3/'` echo "Installed Virtualbox is: "$INSTALLEDVBOXVERSION echo wget -q -N "http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/$INSTALLEDVBOXVERSION/Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-$INSTALLEDVBOXVERSION.vbox-extpack" echo y | VBoxManage extpack install --replace /tmp/Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-"$INSTALLEDVBOXVERSION".vbox-extpack | grep Success rm /tmp/*.vbox-extpack >/dev/null 2>&1 rm /tmp/LATEST-STABLE.TXT >/dev/null 2>&1 While the script “gets the job done” … meh. I’d like a proper ansible playbook that could do this. All the examples on Ansible Galaxy that I’ve looked at needed the Virtualbox version number statically defined as variable inside their playbooks or their role’s variable definitions… not really what I want. I’d like to get ansible to look at the “LATEST-STABLE.TXT” file on Oracle’s web site, read that into a variable, and then act accordingly. So my ansible playbook would need to: * read the contents of “https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/LATEST-STABLE.TXT” * assign that resulting number to a variable (“6.0.10”) * cut that number down so we know the major release (“6.0”) * install the “virtualbox-*” package that results from that (“virtualbox-6.0”) * download and install the Extension Package too (“Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-6.0.10.vbox-extpack”) I’ve been tinkering around with “get_url”, “slurp”, “fetch”, “lookup” and what not but I always fail to get the content of “LATEST-STABLE.TXT” assigned to a variable. What would be a proper Ansible way to do that? Thanks in advance for any help <3
What you are looking for is the set_fact module. This allows you to set a variable in the current context which will allow you to use it in the subsequent tasks in the play.