Automating File Reading with Ansible

Automate reading and displaying text files in a directory with Ansible using find, slurp, and debug modules to manage file content effortlessly.

Introduction

Automation is key in modern IT infrastructure management. Ansible, a powerful automation tool, makes it easy to manage complex environments. One of the many tasks you can automate with Ansible is reading content from multiple files. This article will guide you through a simple playbook that reads content from text files within a specified directory and displays the content.

Understanding the Playbook

The provided playbook is designed to run on the local host and performs the following tasks:

1. List all text files in the specified directory and its subdirectories.

2. Read the content from each text file.

3. Display the content of the files.

Let's break down each section of the playbook to understand how it works.

Listing Files in a Directory

First, we use the ansible.builtin.find module to list all text files in the specified directory (/path/to/your/directory). The recurse: yes option ensures that the search includes subdirectories.

``yaml


name: List files in directory
  ansible.builtin.find:
    paths: "/path/to/your/directory"
    recurse: yes
    patterns: "*.txt"
  register: files_list

The results are stored in a variable called files_list.



Reading Content from Each File

Next, we initialize an empty list to store the file contents using ansible.builtin.set_fact.

`yaml


name: Read content from each file
  ansible.builtin.set_fact:
    file_contents: []

We then use a loop to iterate over each file in files_list.files. The ansible.builtin.slurp module reads the content of each file and stores it in the slurped_files variable. The loop_control ensures we use a custom loop variable item_info.

`yaml


    - name: Read content from each file
      ansible.builtin.slurp:
        src: "{{ item.path }}"
      loop: "{{ files_list.files }}"
      register: slurped_files
      loop_control:
        loop_var: item

    - name: Set fact for file contents
      ansible.builtin.set_fact:
        file_contents: "{{ slurped_files.results | map(attribute='content') | map('b64decode') | list }}"



Displaying File Contents

Finally, we display the content of the files using the ansible.builtin.debug module.

`yaml


name: Display file contents
  ansible.builtin.debug:
    var: file_contents



Complete Playbook

Here's the complete playbook for reference:

``yaml

---

name: Read content from multiple files

hosts: localhost

gather_facts: no

tasks:

- name: List files in directory

ansible.builtin.find:

paths: "/path/to/your/directory"

recurse: yes

patterns: "*.txt"

- name: Read content from each file

ansible.builtin.slurp:

src: "{{ item.path }}"

loop: "{{ files_list.files }}"

loop_control:

loop_var: item

- name: Set fact for file contents

ansible.builtin.set_fact:

file_contents: "{{ slurped_files.results | m