Ansible stat module
I use the Ansible stat module mostly for conditional statements.
For example, only when directory /var/www/phpmyadmin does not exist include the task for installing PHPMyAdmin.
Only when
<directory>exists;<do this>
But of course, there are a lot of other uses for this module then the one I use most.
It does this by doing the following two things:
- get all system-information about the directory
- execute statement, depending on values from the fetched system-information
But there are a lot of uses for the stat module.
The official documentation for the stat module is on, ofcourse, the Ansible website: http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/stat_module.html
full example
# file: install.yml
# install PHPMyAdmin when it's not installed already
- name: PHPMyAdmin | check the need for installment
stat:
path: /var/www/html/phpmyadmin
register: pma
# Only include the PHPMyAdmin installation-task when it's not installed yet
# e.g. the directory /var/www/html/phpmyadmin does not exist
- include: PHPMyAdmin | install
when: pma.stat.isdir is not defined
As you can see, we’re checking against the variable pma which holds the stats information for our path /var/www/html/phpmyadmin. This variable holds a lot more then just the isdir property.
The full list of information returned by the Ansible stat module:
- atime
- attributes
- charset
- checksum
- ctime
- dev
- executable
- exists
- gid
- gr_name
- inode
- isblk
- ischr
- isdir
- isfifo
- isgid
- islnk
- isreg
- issock
- isuid
- lnk_source
- md5
- mime_type
- mode
- mtime
- nlink
- path
- pw_name
- readable
- rgrp
- roth
- rusr
- size
- uid
- wgrp
- woth
- writeable
- wusr
- xgrp
- xoth
- xusr
I will continue to update this page as needed.
