During my last Ansible training the students needed to create some Ansible templates for them selfs. As I do not want to run a testing template against some, or all, machines under Ansible control I created a small Ansible playbook to test templates.
This is the playbook:
---
#
# This playbook renders a template and shows the results
# Run this playbook with:
#
# ansible-playbook -e templ=<name of the template> template_test.yml
#
- hosts: localhost
become: false
connection: local
tasks:
- fail:
msg: "Bailing out. The play requires a template name (templ=...)"
when: templ is undefined
- name: do template
template:
src: "{{ templ }}"
dest: "/tmp/{{ templ }}"
- name: get template
command: cat "/tmp/{{ templ }}"
register: tmplt
- name: show template
debug:
msg: "{{ tmplt.stdout.split('\n') }}"
- name: remove template
file:
path: "/tmp/{{ templ }}"
state: absent
I called this playbook template_test.yml. We where discussing the
inner workings of this playbook, when one of the trainees said:
“Why don’t you call it TAttr”? Hmm, TAttr? Yeah, he said, “Ton’s Ansible
Template Tester”.
And see, a new tool is born!