Adapting the roles

So, how do we build the logic into our roles to execute only certain parts of them on different operating systems? As we know, the package names will be different. How do we define different sets of variables per operating system?

Operating system family

We have looked at the ansible.builtin.setup module in Chapter 1, Installing and Running Ansible; this module gathers facts about our target hosts.

One of these facts is ansible_os_family; this tells us the type of operating system we are running.

To demonstrate this, I have launched two hosts, one running Ubuntu 22.04, and the second running Rocky Linux 9 as its operating system. I have created an inventory file which looks like the following:

RedHat ansible_host=178.79.178.78.nip.io
Debian ansible_host=176.58.114.60.nip.io
[ansible_hosts]
RedHat
Debian
[ansible_hosts:vars]
ansible_connection=ssh
ansible_user=root
ansible_private_key_file=~/.ssh/id_rsa
host_key_checking=False

Important note

The...