I’ve been playing around with ansible a lot lately, and I noticed that while changing stuff from “installed and configured manually” to “installed and configured by ansible” I was running into quite a few configuration files that needed to be manually turned into templates. It can be quite tedious to replace values in a configuration file with placeholders and put all those placeholders in a .yml file with default values.
Automating this is something I would have typically done in perl, but since I wanted to learn more about using regex in bash I decided to have a go at it in bash using regex and ${BASH_REMATCH}

The script takes a configuration file and spits out an ansible template, as well as the variable definitions you will need to add to your defaults/main.yml or vars/main.yml

The whole script is a bit to long to post here, but the interesting part is:

(You can download the full script here ansible_template.sh).

You can use regular expressions in a [[ ]] with =~ (e.g. if [[ “boot” =~ ^b ]]), and you can access the result of the regular expression by using ( ) to mark what parts of the result to store and access them via $BASH_REMATCH (comparable to how you would do it for other languages). Here I am parsing out anything that looks like a key=value from the configfile (with multiple possible separators) and storing the results in BASH_REMATCH[1] and BASH_REMATCH[2]

Usage of the script is pretty straightforward. you give it a prefix for the variable names (so you don’t end up with multiple roles all using a common variable name like “port”), and either a local or remote file to work with, and it spits out something like this:

There a tons of different configuration file formats out there so this script won’t work perfectly 100% of the time, but it does do quite well and reduces the manually copy&pasting to a minimum.