You are reading an unmaintained version of the Ansible documentation. Unmaintained Ansible versions can contain unfixed security vulnerabilities (CVE). Please upgrade to a maintained version. See the latest Ansible documentation.

Templating (Jinja2)

Ansible uses Jinja2 templating to enable dynamic expressions and access to variables and facts. You can use templating with the template module. For example, you can create a template for a configuration file, then deploy that configuration file to multiple environments and supply the correct data (IP address, hostname, version) for each environment. You can also use templating in playbooks directly, by templating task names and more. You can use all the standard filters and tests included in Jinja2. Ansible includes additional specialized filters for selecting and transforming data, tests for evaluating template expressions, and Lookup plugins for retrieving data from external sources such as files, APIs, and databases for use in templating.

All templating happens on the Ansible controller before the task is sent and executed on the target machine. This approach minimizes the package requirements on the target (jinja2 is only required on the controller). It also limits the amount of data Ansible passes to the target machine. Ansible parses templates on the controller and passes only the information needed for each task to the target machine, instead of passing all the data on the controller and parsing it on the target.

Note

Files and data used by the template module must be utf-8 encoded.

• Using filters to manipulate data
  • Handling undefined variables
  • Defining different values for true/false/null (ternary)
  • Managing data types
  • Formatting data: YAML and JSON
  • Combining and selecting data
  • Randomizing data
  • Managing list variables
  • Selecting from sets or lists (set theory)
  • Calculating numbers (math)
  • Managing network interactions
  • Hashing and encrypting strings and passwords
  • Manipulating text
  • Manipulating strings
  • Managing UUIDs
  • Handling dates and times
  • Getting Kubernetes resource names
• Tests
  • Test syntax
  • Testing strings
  • Vault
  • Testing truthiness
  • Comparing versions
  • Set theory tests
  • Testing if a list contains a value
  • Testing if a list value is True
  • Testing paths
  • Testing size formats
  • Testing task results
• Lookups
  • Using lookups in variables
• Python3 in templates
  • Dictionary views
  • dict.iteritems()

Get the current time

New in version 2.8.

The now() Jinja2 function retrieves a 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 returns a formatted date time string.

See also

Intro to playbooks

An introduction to playbooks

Conditionals

Conditional statements in playbooks

Loops

Looping in playbooks

Roles

Playbook organization by roles

Tips and tricks

Tips and tricks for playbooks

Jinja2 Docs

Jinja2 documentation, includes the syntax and semantics of the templates

User Mailing List

Have a question? Stop by the google group!

Real-time chat

How to join Ansible chat channels