community.general.alternatives – Manages alternative programs for common commands

Note

This plugin is part of the community.general collection (version 3.8.3).

You might already have this collection installed if you are using the ansible package. It is not included in ansible-core. To check whether it is installed, run ansible-galaxy collection list.

To install it, use: ansible-galaxy collection install community.general.

To use it in a playbook, specify: community.general.alternatives.

Synopsis

  • Manages symbolic links using the ‘update-alternatives’ tool.

  • Useful when multiple programs are installed but provide similar functionality (e.g. different editors).

Requirements

The below requirements are needed on the host that executes this module.

  • update-alternatives

Parameters

Parameter

Comments

path

The path to the symbolic link that should point to the real executable.

This option is always required on RHEL-based distributions. On Debian-based distributions this option is required when the alternative name is unknown to the system.

name

string / required

The generic name of the link.

path

path / required

The path to the real executable that the link should point to.

priority

integer

The priority of the alternative.

Default: 50

Examples

- name: Correct java version selected
  community.general.alternatives:
    name: java
    path: /usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-amd64/jre/bin/java

- name: Alternatives link created
  community.general.alternatives:
    name: hadoop-conf
    link: /etc/hadoop/conf
    path: /etc/hadoop/conf.ansible

- name: Make java 32 bit an alternative with low priority
  community.general.alternatives:
    name: java
    path: /usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-i386/jre/bin/java
    priority: -10

Authors

  • David Wittman (@DavidWittman)

  • Gabe Mulley (@mulby)