Configure web server on different OS distribution with Ansible

2 min readMar 26, 2021

Agenda

👉 Create an Ansible Playbook which will dynamically load the variable file named the same as OS_name and just by using the variable names we can Configure our target node. (Note: No need to use when keyword here.)

For this task, we can use the vars_files module. we will create the var files with <OS-distribution>-<version>.yml. And the name will be changed according to the OS name and version from the ansible facts with jinja2 format

For this exercise, I have two different OS installed on Oracle VM Box. The first is RedHat Enterprise Linux 8 and the second is Ubuntu 20. Both Linux has a different package for the same task that's why we need to create two separate files. Here is those files:

RedHat-8.yml

software: httpd

Ubuntu-20.yml

software: apache2

And the final YAML code for the webserver configuration.

web-config.yml

- hosts: webserver
  vars_files:
  - "{{ ansible_facts['distribution'] }}-{{ ansible_facts['distribution_major_version'] }}.yml"
  tasks:
  - name: Installing {{ software }}
    package:
      name: "{{ software }}"
      state: present- name: Writing the content
    copy:
      dest: /var/www/html/index.html
      content: "Automation with the Ansible on {{ ansible_facts['distribution'] }}"- name: Starting the service
    service:
      name: "{{ software }}"
      state: started

Structure of the entire exercise