Webarchitects /etc/hosts Ansible role

An Ansible role to configure the contents of /etc/hosts.

By default this role edits, rather than templating the /etc/hosts file, this has the advantage that it won't remove comments or existing lines (when not asked to), however in this mode it can't re-order lines, set etchosts_template to true for the /etc/hosts file to be templated.

Usage

The existing content of /etc/hosts can be read as YAML using JC:

cat /etc/hosts | jc --hosts -y

  - ip: 127.0.0.1
    hostname:
      - localhost
  - ip: ::1
    hostname:
      - ip6-localhost
      - ip6-loopback

The result returned when jc --hosts -y is used to parse the /etc/hosts file can be directly used for the etchosts_file array, with the optional addition of a state variable that can be added to each item and set to present (the default) or absent.

Role variables

See the defaults/main.yml file for the default variables, the vars/main.yml file for the preset variables and the meta/argument_specs.yml file for the variable specification.

etchosts

A boolean that defaults to false, set etchosts to true for the tasks in this role to be run.

etchosts_file

A list of entries for the /etc/hosts file in the same format as returned by the JC hosts parser, plus an optional state variable, for example:

etchosts_file:
  - ip: 192.168.0.1
    state: absent
  - ip: 192.168.0.2
    hostname:
      - foo.example.lan
      - foo

The ip address is required, the hostname is only required when the state is not defined or set to present.

etchosts_hostname

The domain name for /etc/hostname, if blank the hostname will not be set.

etchosts_hostname_strategy

The strategy for ansible.builtin.hostname to use.

etchosts_mailname

The domain name for /etc/mailname, if blank the mailname will not be set.

etchosts_template

A boolean that defaults to false which results in the /etc/hosts file being edited using ansible.buiiltin.lineinfile, set etchosts_template to true for ansible.builtin.template to be used.

etchosts_validate

A boolean that defaults to true, which results in the meta/argument_specs.yml file being used to check all variables that start with etchosts_.

Repository

The primary URL of this repo is https://git.coop/webarch/etchosts however it is also mirrored to GitHub and available via Ansible Galaxy.

If you use this role please use a tagged release, see the release notes.

Copyright

Copyright 2023-2024 Chris Croome, <chris@webarchitects.co.uk>.

This role is released under the same terms as Ansible itself, the GNU GPLv3.