Jinja2 templates
What is Jinja all about? Jinja2 is a very popular and powerful Python-based template engine. Since Ansible is written in Python, it becomes the default choice for most users, just like other Python-based configuration management systems, such as Fabric and SaltStack. The name Jinja originated from the Japanese word for temple, which is similar in phonetics to the word template.
Some of the important features of Jinja2 are:
- It is fast and compiled just in time with the Python byte code
- It has an optional sandboxed environment
- It is easy to debug
- It supports template inheritance
The template formation
Templates look very similar to normal text-based files except for the occasional variables or code that surrounds the special tags. These get evaluated and are mostly replaced by values at runtime, creating a text file, which is then copied to the destination host. The following are the two types of tags that Jinja2 templates accept:
{{ }}embeds variables inside a template and prints...
