using regex in jinja 2 for ansible playbooks

Question

HI i am new to jinja2 and trying to use regular expression as shown below

{% if ansible_hostname == \'uat\' %}
   {% set server = \'thinkingmonster.com\' %}
         


        

Answer 1

To my knowledge, there is no builtin filter for that in Jinja2 neither among Ansible's extra filters, but it's not a big deal to make your own:

certs = {'.*thinking.*': 'akash', '.*sleeping.*': 'akashthakur'}
def map_regex(value, mapping=certs):
    for k, v in mapping.items():
        if re.match(k, value):
            return v 

Then you'll need to add a filter plugin to Ansible, so that it will use the function above in templates (like {{server|ssl_cert}} if you name the filter ssl_cert).

That said, a plain old function or a plain old dictionary that is passed to the templates and used there explicitly might fit this job better.