Update 3/31/2016: The implementation of the ini_file module described in this blogpost has been merged into Ansible version 2.0.

For editing Windows INI files, Ansible comes with an ini_file module built in. Unfortunately, this module uses Python’s ConfigParser module which reformats the entire INI file whenever you want to change a single line. It removes all the comment lines, too. For me this was not acceptable. After looking for a possible solution I decided to improve the ini_file module and created ini_file2. I realized how easy it is to create an Ansible module.

On Debian Linux, the Ansible’s built-in ini_file module can be found at /usr/share/ansible/files/ini_file. This file is the base for our own ini_file2. The question was, at what location should one store the ini_file2 module for Ansible to find it? From Ansible’s documentation I learned that when looking for modules, Ansible searches the ./library directory alongside of the top level playbooks. That sounds perfect to me.

After a while working with the Python code, I created the ini_file2 module. This module provides an equivalent functionality to the original ini_file module, however, it does only the minimum changes when editing the INI file. It typically modifies only one line. When removing options, it doesn’t delete the lines but comment them out instead. If there was a commented out option it comments it in when required.

The ini_file and ini_file2 comparison

Let’s compare the ini_file and ini_file2 on a practical example. Our input INI file looks as follows:

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# This is the main configuration section
# There are some important options to configure
[main]
# This is the first option
option1 = orig_value

# This is the second option
# If not set, the default value is def_value
# option2 = def_value

# This is the last option
# If not set, the default value is def_value
option3 = some_value

The Ansible test script will set the option1 and option2 to new_value and it will remove the option3 from the INI file:

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- name: Set option1 to new_value
  ini_file: dest=settings.ini section=main option=option1 value=new_value

- name: Set option2 to new_value
  ini_file: dest=settings.ini section=main option=option2 value=new_value

- name: Remove option3
  ini_file: dest=settings.ini section=main option=option3 state=absent

When using the original ini_file module, the resulting INI file looks like this:

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[main]
option1 = new_value
option2 = new_value

You can see that there’s not much left from the input file. All comments are gone. In contrast, the ini_file2 module does the editing operations with more precision:

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# This is the main configuration section
# There are some important options to configure
[main]
# This is the first option
option1 = new_value

# This is the second option
# If not set, the default value is def_value
option2 = new_value

# This is the last option
# If not set, the default value is def_value
#option3 = some_value

References

The ini_file2 source code as well as test scripts can be found at GitHub.