Ansible templates with timestamps

Question

I'm trying to figure out if there's way of adding a timestamp to a template file in Ansible so that everytime I run an Ansible playbook which uses a certain template, it adds in the destination file the time of the execution of the playbook.

For example, I'm templating a configuration file with Ansible and I want it on the destination machine to appear with a timestamp on the first line...

e.g.

cat something.conf_template
some config lines

After templating:

- template: src=/mytemplates/something.conf_template dest=/etc/something.conf owner=smth group=smth mode=0644

the contents should be

cat something.conf
#in this comment is the timestamp, format irrelevant
some config lines

Do you know any ansible module that can do this?

Answer 1

You can simply add # {{ ansible_managed }} to the top of your template. This variable is defined in your configuration file to have a default of:

Ansible managed: {file} modified on %Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S by {uid} on {host}

Note that since this contains a timestamp by default it means that every time your template task is invoked it will update the destination file with the current timestamp.