Ansible Journey: Adding /etc/fstab Entries

As noted in yesterday's post, I'm working on a new customer-project. One of the automation-tools this customer uses is Ansible. This is a new-to-me automation-technology. Previously — and aside from just writing bare BASH and Python code — I've used frameworks like Puppet, SaltStack and a couple others. So, picking up a new automation-technology — especially one that uses a DSL not terribly unlike one I was already familiar with, hasn't been super much of a stretch.

After sorting out yesterday's problem and how I wanted my /etc/fstab to look, I set about implementing it via Ansible. Ultimately, I ended up settling on a list-of-maps variable to drive a lineinfile role-task. I chose a list-of-maps variable mostly because the YAML that Ansible relies on doesn't really do tuples. My var ended up looking like:

s3fs_fstab_nest:
  - mountpoint: /provisioning/repo
    bucket: s3fs-build-bukkit
    folder: RPMs
  - mountpoint: /provisioning/installers
    bucket: s3fs-build-bukkit
    folder: EXEs
  - mountpoint: /Data/personal
    bucket: s3fs-users-bukkit
    folder: build

And my play ended up looking like:

---
- name:  "Add mount to /etc/fstab"
  lineinfile:
    path: '/etc/fstab'
    line: "s3fs#{{ item.bucket }}:/{{ item.folder }}\t{{ item.mountpoint }}fuse\t_netdev,allow_other,umask=0000,nonempty 0 0"
  loop: "{{ s3fs_fstab_nest }}"
...

Was actually a lot simpler than I was expecting it to be.