Super important Ansible facts

There are some facts that I use very frequently, they are super important to me.

This is more a therapeutic post for me, than it’s a great read to you. ;-)

Sometimes, actually most of the times, each operating system or distribution needs something specific. For example Apache httpd has different package named for mostly every distribution. This mapping (distro:packagename) can be done using this variable: ansible_os_family.

Try to select packages/service-names/directories/files/etc based on the most general level and work your way down to more specific when required. This results in a sort of priority list:

1. General variable, not related to a distribution. For example: postfix_package.
2. ansible_os_family variable, related to the type of distribution, for example: httpd_package which differs for Alpine, Archlinux, Debian, Suse and RedHat. (But is’t the same for docker images debian and ubuntu.)
3. ansible_distribution variable when each distribution has differences. For example: reboot_requirements. CentOS needs yum-utils, but Fedora needs dnf-utils.
4. ansible_distribution and ansible_distribution_major_version when there are differences per distribution release. For example firewall_packages. CentOS 6 and CentOS 7 need to have a different package.

Here is a list of containers and their ansible_os_family.