assemble – Assemble configuration files from fragments

Synopsis

• Assembles a configuration file from fragments.

• Often a particular program will take a single configuration file and does not support a conf.d style structure where it is easy to build up the configuration from multiple sources. assemble will take a directory of files that can be local or have already been transferred to the system, and concatenate them together to produce a destination file.

• Files are assembled in string sorting order.

• Puppet calls this idea fragments.

Parameters

Parameter	Choices/Defaults	Comments
attributes string		The attributes the resulting file or directory should have. To get supported flags look at the man page for chattr on the target system. This string should contain the attributes in the same order as the one displayed by lsattr. The = operator is assumed as default, otherwise + or - operators need to be included in the string. aliases: attr
backup boolean	Choices: no ← yes	Create a backup file (if yes), including the timestamp information so you can get the original file back if you somehow clobbered it incorrectly.
decrypt boolean added in 2.4	Choices: no yes ←	This option controls the autodecryption of source files using vault.
delimiter string		A delimiter to separate the file contents.
dest path / required		A file to create using the concatenation of all of the source files.
group string		Name of the group that should own the file/directory, as would be fed to chown.
ignore_hidden boolean	Choices: no ← yes	A boolean that controls if files that start with a '.' will be included or not.
mode string		The permissions the resulting file or directory should have. For those used to /usr/bin/chmod remember that modes are actually octal numbers. You must either add a leading zero so that Ansible's YAML parser knows it is an octal number (like 0644 or 01777) or quote it (like '644' or '1777') so Ansible receives a string and can do its own conversion from string into number. Giving Ansible a number without following one of these rules will end up with a decimal number which will have unexpected results. As of Ansible 1.8, the mode may be specified as a symbolic mode (for example, u+rwx or u=rw,g=r,o=r).
owner string		Name of the user that should own the file/directory, as would be fed to chown.
regexp string		Assemble files only if regex matches the filename. If not set, all files are assembled. Every "\" (backslash) must be escaped as "\\" to comply to YAML syntax. Uses remote_src boolean	Choices: no ← yes	If no, it will search for src at originating/master machine. If yes, it will go to the remote/target machine for the src.
selevel string	Default: "s0"	The level part of the SELinux file context. This is the MLS/MCS attribute, sometimes known as the range. When set to _default, it will use the level portion of the policy if available.
serole string		The role part of the SELinux file context. When set to _default, it will use the role portion of the policy if available.
setype string		The type part of the SELinux file context. When set to _default, it will use the type portion of the policy if available.
seuser string		The user part of the SELinux file context. By default it uses the system policy, where applicable. When set to _default, it will use the user portion of the policy if available.
src path / required		An already existing directory full of source files.
unsafe_writes boolean	Choices: no ← yes	Influence when to use atomic operation to prevent data corruption or inconsistent reads from the target file. By default this module uses atomic operations to prevent data corruption or inconsistent reads from the target files, but sometimes systems are configured or just broken in ways that prevent this. One example is docker mounted files, which cannot be updated atomically from inside the container and can only be written in an unsafe manner. This option allows Ansible to fall back to unsafe methods of updating files when atomic operations fail (however, it doesn't force Ansible to perform unsafe writes). IMPORTANT! Unsafe writes are subject to race conditions and can lead to data corruption.
validate string		The validation command to run before copying into place. The path to the file to validate is passed in via '%s' which must be present as in the sshd example below. The command is passed securely so shell features like expansion and pipes won't work.

See Also

See also

copy – Copy files to remote locations

The official documentation on the copy module.

template – Template a file out to a remote server

The official documentation on the template module.

win_copy – Copies files to remote locations on windows hosts

The official documentation on the win_copy module.

Examples

- name: Assemble from fragments from a directory
  assemble:
    src: /etc/someapp/fragments
    dest: /etc/someapp/someapp.conf

- name: Inserted provided delimiter in between each fragment
  assemble:
    src: /etc/someapp/fragments
    dest: /etc/someapp/someapp.conf
    delimiter: '### START FRAGMENT ###'

- name: Assemble a new "sshd_config" file into place, after passing validation with sshd
  assemble:
    src: /etc/ssh/conf.d/
    dest: /etc/ssh/sshd_config
    validate: /usr/sbin/sshd -t -f %s

Status

• This module is guaranteed to have backward compatible interface changes going forward. [stableinterface]

• This module is maintained by the Ansible Core Team. [core]

Red Hat Support

More information about Red Hat’s support of this module is available from this Red Hat Knowledge Base article.

Authors

• Stephen Fromm (@sfromm)

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