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initall
Asked: 2015-12-15 07:02:05 +0800 CST

How to refer to an existing uid and gid in Ansible?

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In my playbook I install the amavis package. Later in a task I use the mount module to setup a ramdisk (tmpfs).

In order to let the tmpfs-ramdisk be owned by the uid and gid created during amavis package install (amavis-user and amavis-group, in /etc/fstab then using the options parameter) how do I find out which uid and gid was created?

Goal (something like):

/dev/shm /var/lib/amavis/tmp tmpfs defaults,noexec,nosuid,nodev,noatime,size=500m,mode=770,uid=112,gid=116 0 0

Or should I create the users before package installation to explicitly set uid and gid via Ansible?

linux

3 Answers

  1. See the Ansible module getent with database=passwd.

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  2. Best Answer

    You should be able to just specify uid=amavis-user,gid=amavis-group in your /etc/fstab. The linux mount program will interpret them correctly.

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  3. While Bruce P's answer is often a good solutions in some situations there is no way to just supply a name. Following Satish Koppisetty's approach here is some code to do it:

    - name: get myuser uid
  getent:
    database: passwd
    key: myuser

- name: get mygroup gid
  getent:
    database: group
    key: mygroup

    You now have two dictionaries (getent_passwd and getent_group), from which you can retrieve the data. The following code just outputs the ids:

    - debug:
    msg:
      - "user id {{ getent_passwd.myuser[1] }}"
      - "group id {{ getent_group.mygroup[1] }}"

    A tiny bit of background: this is the case because getent returns a dictionary that looks something like this:

    {
    "mygroup": [
        "x",
        "1004",
        "some_group_member"
    ]
}
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