Ubuntu – Ansible Jinja2 Template dict in dict

You should use community.general.ini_file module, which was designed exactly for your usecase – to tweak existing settings, without maintaining defaults yourself.

I created a minimal reproducible playbook to illustrate how you can map your yaml settings into existing ini file

Let’s say we have a config.ini file inside playbook directory, with following contents:

[section0]
key0 = value0
[section1]
key1 = old_value

We can then execute the following playbook.yaml

- name: Generate ini from yaml
  hosts: localhost
  vars:
    default_php_config_options:
      section1:
        key1: default_value
      section2:
        key2: default_value
      section3:
        key3: default_value
    php_config_options:
      section1:
        key1: value1
      section2:
        key2: value2
        key3: value4
  tasks:
    - name: Generate INI file from YAML variable
      community.general.ini_file:
        path: "{{ playbook_dir }}/config.ini"
        section: "{{ item.0 }}"
        option: "{{ item.1 }}"
        value: "{{ item.2 }}"
        mode: "0644"
      loop: >-
          {%- set results = [] -%}
          {%- for section in default_php_config_options | combine(php_config_options) | items -%}
          {%- for item in section.1.items() -%}
          {%- set _ = results.append([section.0, item.0, item.1]) %}
          {%- endfor -%}
          {%- endfor -%}
          {{ results }}

In this playbook we define 2 variables, default_php_config_options with default settings that need to be overriden and php_config_options which contain overrides for default options.

The output of command ansible-playbook playbook.yaml will contain

TASK [Generate INI file from YAML variable] 
changed: [localhost] => (item=['section1', 'key1', 'value1'])
changed: [localhost] => (item=['section2', 'key2', 'value2'])
changed: [localhost] => (item=['section2', 'key3', 'value4'])
changed: [localhost] => (item=['section3', 'key3', 'default_value'])

and the contents of file config.ini are

[section0]
key0 = value0
[section1]
key1 = value1
[section2]
key2 = value2
key3 = value4
[section3]
key3 = default_value

Notice that value of key1 in section1 was replaced, and missing options were added, while original section0 values remain unchanged.

Now about this loop, what are we doing – we are combining default_php_config_options with php_config_options, thus overriding former with values from later if present (see combine filter docs), and then for each key/value pair in each section we are creating list, containing

• section
• key name
• value of that key

And executing init_file module for each generated list. I’m sure that other jinja-gurus can come up with clever function to solve same task, but I like my playbooks to be explicit.

The caveat is that if you’ll delete something from default_php_config_options or in php_config_options, but in key, that wasn’t present in defaults, it wont change already changed keys or sections back to default values. In that case you should either explicitly specify old value, or create a separate task to remove unneeded keys.

Edit: added combine example. default_php_config_options | combine(php_config_options) can be used with @Vladimir Botka example as well, but I’ll leave my answer which gives an ability to work with existing ini files.