Templating (Jinja2)

As already referenced in the variables section, Ansible uses Jinja2 templating to enable dynamic expressions and access to variables. Ansible greatly expands the number of filters and tests available, as well as adding a new plugin type: lookups.

Please note that all templating happens on the Ansible controller before the task is sent and executed on the target machine. This is done to minimize the requirements on the target (jinja2 is only required on the controller) and to be able to pass the minimal information needed for the task, so the target machine does not need a copy of all the data that the controller has access to.

Topics

• Templating (Jinja2)

  • Get the current time

• Filters
  • Filters For Formatting Data
  • Forcing Variables To Be Defined
  • Defaulting Undefined Variables
  • Omitting Parameters
  • List Filters
  • Set Theory Filters
  • Dict Filter
  • items2dict filter
  • zip and zip_longest filters
  • subelements Filter
  • Random Mac Address Filter
  • Random Number Filter
  • Shuffle Filter
  • Math
  • JSON Query Filter
  • IP address filter
  • Network CLI filters
  • Network XML filters
  • Network VLAN filters
  • Hashing filters
  • Combining hashes/dictionaries
  • Extracting values from containers
  • Comment Filter
  • URL Split Filter
  • Regular Expression Filters
  • Kubernetes Filters
  • Other Useful Filters
  • Combination Filters
  • Product Filters
  • Debugging Filters
  • Computer Theory Assertions
  • Human Readable
  • Human to Bytes
• Tests
  • Test syntax
  • Testing strings
  • Version Comparison
  • Set theory tests
  • Test if a list contains a value
  • Testing paths
  • Task results
• Lookups
  • Lookups and loops
  • Lookups and variables
• Python Version and Templating
  • Dictionary Views
  • dict.iteritems()

Get the current time

New in version 2.8.

The now() Jinja2 function, allows you to retrieve python datetime object or a string representation for the current time.

The now() function supports 2 arguments:

utc

Specify True to get the current time in UTC. Defaults to False

fmt

Accepts a strftime string that will be used to return a formatted date time string

See also

About Playbooks

An introduction to playbooks

Conditionals

Conditional statements in playbooks

Loops

Looping in playbooks

Roles

Playbook organization by roles

Best Practices

Best practices in playbooks

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