Ansible Blockinfile Examples

Ansible blockinfile module is used to insert/update/remove a block of lines in a file. This module will insert/update/remove a block of multi-line text surrounded by customizable marker lines. in this blog post i will show you list of examples to insert/update/remove  lines from a file using ansible blockinfile module.

Inserting a Block of Lines using ansible blockinfile:

in this example i am going to show you how to add block of lines to a file using ansible blockinfile module. Here i have text file called abc.txt. and in this file i written some names.

[root@ip-172-31-22-205 ~]# cat abc.txt
Liam
Noah
William
James
Oliver
Benjamin
Elijah
Lucas

now by using ansible blockinfile module i will add some lines to this file.

[root@ip-172-31-22-205 ~]# cat blockinfile.yml
---
- hosts: localhost
  gather_facts: no

  tasks:
  - name: add block of lines to a file.
    blockinfile:
      path: /root/abc.txt
      block: |
       Hi this is decoding devops
       Check out my blog for all devops tools
      backup: yes

along with blockinfile module we use some extra arguments to add block of lines to a file those are path,block,backup.

path: here we have to give the path of the file which you want to modify.

block: here you have to write your lines of code(content) which you want to add to the file

backup: if you mention backup yes, it will create one file in the current directory with timestamp. it will have the content of your old file. in this way we can take backup of your file.

By default, the block will be inserted at the end of the file.

output:

[root@ip-172-31-22-205 ~]# ansible-playbook blockinfile.yml
 [WARNING]: provided hosts list is empty, only localhost is available. Note that the implicit localhost does not match 'all'


PLAY [localhost] ***********************************************************************************************************************************************************

TASK [add block of lines to a file.] ***************************************************************************************************************************************
changed: [localhost]

PLAY RECAP *****************************************************************************************************************************************************************
localhost                  : ok=1    changed=1    unreachable=0    failed=0    skipped=0    rescued=0    ignored=0


[root@ip-172-31-22-205 ~]# cat abc.txt
Liam
Noah
William
James
Oliver
Benjamin
Elijah
Lucas
# BEGIN ANSIBLE MANAGED BLOCK
Hi this is decoding devops
Check out my blog for all devops tools
# END ANSIBLE MANAGED BLOCK


[root@ip-172-31-22-205 ~]# ls
abc.txt  abc.txt.8576.2019-07-09@08:22:38~  blockinfile.yml
[root@ip-172-31-22-205 ~]#

Here you can see in the file  after Lucas new lines are added and you can see one backup file  abc.txt.8576.2019-07-09@08:22:38~ is created.

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