Using block for handlers in Ansible

Sometimes you want to run few operations for your handler instead of just one. In my case, a handler was designed to restart a main service, but with few conditions:

• This service may create a ‘lock file’ which says ‘do not restart me now’…

‘is defined’ in Ansible

There is a very special construction in Jinja2/Ansible: ‘foo is defined’, which allows you to check if foo is existing at all. It’s usually used in this form:

...
when: foo is defined and foo == True

Debian packaging of a pre-compiled java application

Sad story: we have a java application, which is free and available for download as ‘tar.gz’, but we don’t want to use ‘curl-install’ on our production server from somewhere-in-Internets. There are two ways to deal with it: to move the…

How to set password for user in Ansible

Ansible is used for different purposes. Sometimes it’s a core business process where you need to follow all possible best practices and more. Sometimes it’s knock-off script for laboratory environments where you are completely fineto store passwords in the…