win_template – Templates a file out to a remote server

New in version 1.9.2.

Synopsis

  • Templates are processed by the Jinja2 templating language (http://jinja.pocoo.org/docs/) - documentation on the template formatting can be found in the Template Designer Documentation (http://jinja.pocoo.org/docs/templates/).
  • Six additional variables can be used in templates: ansible_managed (configurable via the defaults section of ansible.cfg) contains a string which can be used to describe the template name, host, modification time of the template file and the owner uid, template_host contains the node name of the template’s machine, template_uid the owner, template_path the absolute path of the template, template_fullpath is the absolute path of the template, and template_run_date is the date that the template was rendered. Note that including a string that uses a date in the template will result in the template being marked ‘changed’ each time.

Parameters

Parameter Choices/Defaults Comments
block_end_string
-
added in 2.4
 Default:
"%}"
The string marking the end of a block.
block_start_string
-
added in 2.4
 Default:
"{%"
The string marking the beginning of a block.
dest
- / required
Location to render the template to on the remote machine.
force
boolean
added in 2.4
    Choices:
  • no
  • yes ←
If yes, will replace the remote file when contents are different from the source.
If no, the file will only be transferred if the destination does not exist.
newline_sequence
-
added in 2.4
    Choices:
  • \n
  • \r
  • \r\n ←
Specify the newline sequence to use for templating files.
src
- / required
Path of a Jinja2 formatted template on the local server. This can be a relative or absolute path.
trim_blocks
boolean
added in 2.4
    Choices:
  • no ←
  • yes
If this is set to yes the first newline after a block is removed (block, not variable tag!).
variable_end_string
-
added in 2.4
 Default:
"}}"
The string marking the end of a print statement.
variable_start_string
-
added in 2.4
 Default:
"{{"
The string marking the beginning of a print statement.

Notes

Note

  • For other platforms you can use template which uses ‘n’ as newline_sequence.
  • Templates are loaded with trim_blocks=True.
  • Beware fetching files from windows machines when creating templates because certain tools, such as Powershell ISE, and regedit’s export facility add a Byte Order Mark as the first character of the file, which can cause tracebacks.
  • To find Byte Order Marks in files, use Format-Hex <file> -Count 16 on Windows, and use od -a -t x1 -N 16 <file> on Linux.
  • Also, you can override jinja2 settings by adding a special header to template file. i.e. #jinja2:variable_start_string:'[%', variable_end_string:'%]', trim_blocks: no which changes the variable interpolation markers to [% var %] instead of {{ var }}. This is the best way to prevent evaluation of things that look like, but should not be Jinja2. raw/endraw in Jinja2 will not work as you expect because templates in Ansible are recursively evaluated.

Examples

- name: Create a file from a Jinja2 template
  win_template:
    src: /mytemplates/file.conf.j2
    dest: C:\Temp\file.conf

- name: Create a Unix-style file from a Jinja2 template
  win_template:
    src: unix/config.conf.j2
    dest: C:\share\unix\config.conf
    newline_sequence: '\n'

Status

Red Hat Support

More information about Red Hat’s support of this module is available from this Red Hat Knowledge Base article.

Authors

  • Jon Hawkesworth (@jhawkesworth)

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