uPlaybook for Ansible Users

If you are an Ansible user here are some things to help bring you up to speed.

Forklifting Variables

uPlaybook does some magic so that variables set in your Python code become available in the context for use in templating. This is how the looping example works, item gets forklifted into the Jinja2 context.

with_items / loop

Looping with uPlaybook is done via a Python for loop. However, you want to use the [core.Item()](tasks/core.md#uplaybook.core.Item> helper to define each item.

In Ansible:

---
- name: Config files
  template:
    src: "{{ item.src }}"
    dest: "{{ item.dest }}"
  with_items:
    - src: foo.cfg.j2
      dest: /etc/foo/foo.cfg
    - src: bar.cfg.j2
      dest: /etc/foo/bar.cfg

Would be the following in uPlaybook:

for item in [
        core.Item(src="foo.cfg.j2", path="/etc/foo/foo.cfg"),
        core.Item(src="bar.cfg.j2", path="/etc/foo/bar.cfg"),
        ]:
    fs.cp(**item)
    #  or:
    fs.cp(src=item.src, path=item.dst)
    #  or:
    fs.cp(src="{{item.src}}", path="{{item.dst}}")

The **item syntax applies the attributes from item as if they are arguments to the function.

Common File Arguments

Many tasks in Ansible take these common arguments: owner, group, mode. uPlaybook provides the fs.builder() meta-task to do simiar functionality.

Example:

for item in [ core.Item(path="dest", action="directory"), core.Item(src="foo", path="dest/foo", owner="root"), core.Item(src="bar", path="dest/bar", owner="root"), core.Item(path="dest/user-config", group="nobody", mode="a=rX", action="exists"), core.Item(path="dest/legacy-file", action="absent"), ]: fs.builder(**items)