Documentation

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
(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
(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

This module is flagged as stableinterface which means that the maintainers for this module guarantee that no backward incompatible interface changes will be made.

Support

For more information about Red Hat’s support of this module, please refer to this Knowledge Base article

Author

  • Jon Hawkesworth (@jhawkesworth)

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