Various plug-ins for Ansible

These are a small collection of modules and plug-ins I created while coming up with Ansible playbooks for my network. Ansible is a lightweight and simple system for managing system configurations.

This software has the same license as Ansible, GPLv3.

What's here

• augtool module: Modify configuration files using Augeas' augtool from Ansible. Augeas is great when you want to edit a configuration file rather than replace it (e.g. with Ansible's built-in template module).

• load_gpg_vars module: Load host variables from an encrypted YAML file. This is a quirky module but it can be useful for keeping information such as passwords for new user accounts you want to set up when provisioning a system.

  Note: this should probably be replaced by ansible-vault once Ansible 1.5 is released.

• dns lookup plug-in: Lets you resolve host names to their IP addresses. This very simple module just calls gethostbyname for now, so it surely won't cover all use cases, and it definitely doesn't support IPv6. For example, this will be replaced with the IP for www.ansible.cc:

    {{ lookup('dns', 'www.ansible.cc') }}
  

  I used this when making IPTables rules, which needed an IP address, but where I didn't want to "hard code" the IP in my playbook.

• hash filter plug-in: If you have passlib installed, you can use this filter plug-in to hash passwords. For example:

    {{ plain_text_password|hash("sha512_crypt", salt_size=16) }}
  

  See http://pythonhosted.org/passlib/lib/passlib.hash.html for a list of supported hashes and their arguments.

  This filter could be particularly useful in conjunction with plain text passwords kept in a GPG file using the load_gpg_vars module, above. See that module's documentation for an example.

• regexp_escape filter plug-in: Gives you a regexp_escape filter. This can be useful when, for example, you're interpolating variables into the regexp argument of the built-in lineinfile module.

• vault_from_gpg_agent.py: A script that allows Ansible Vault to read its passphrase via gpg-agent, which can (relatively) securely keep your passphrase in memory and save you from having to enter it every time you run ansible-playbook. See this mailing list post for more details. Use this script by setting vault_password_file = vault_from_gpg_agent.py in your Ansible configuration file, or use --vault-password-file=vault_from_gpg_agent.py on the command line. Make sure the script is executable!