Ansible Group Module Demo: Create User Groups Easily

How to create a group in Linux with Ansible?

I’m going to show you a live Playbook with some simple Ansible code. I’m Luca Berton and welcome to today’s episode of Ansible Pilot.

Ansible creates a group

ansible.builtin.group Add or remove groups

Today we’re talking about the Ansible module group. The full name is ansible.builtin.group, which means that is part of the collection of modules “builtin” with Ansible and shipped with it. It’s a module pretty stable and out for years. It adds or removes groups. It supports a huge variety of Linux distributions and macOS. It relies on three Linux commands: groupadd, groupdel and groupmod. For Windows, use the ansible.windows.win_group module instead.

Parameters

• name string - group name
• state string - present/absent
• system boolean - yes/no
• gid integer - GID to set for the group
• local string - “local” command alternatives

This module has some parameters to perform some tasks. The only required is “name”, which is the group name. The “state” parameter allows us to create or delete a group, in our use case the default it’s already set to “present” to create a group. The “system” parameter allows for the creation of a system group, default it’s not. You could specify the “GID”, the group identifier, in using the “gid” parameter. The “local” parameter allows using the “local” command alternatives on platforms that implement it if you have a central authentication system.

Playbook

Let’s jump in a real-life Ansible Playbook to create a group.

code

• create_group.yml

---
- name: group module Playbook
  hosts: all
  become: true
  vars:
    mygroup: "example"
  tasks:
    - name: create group
      ansible.builtin.group:
        name: "{{ mygroup }}"
        state: present

execution

$ ansible-playbook group/create.yml
PLAY [group module Playbook] **************************************************************************
TASK [Gathering Facts] ****************************************************************************
ok: [demo.example.com]
TASK [create group] *******************************************************************************
changed: [demo.example.com]
PLAY RECAP ****************************************************************************************
demo.example.com           : ok=2    changed=1    unreachable=0    failed=0    skipped=0    rescued=0    ignored=0

verification

$ ssh [email protected]
$ sudo su
# getent group | grep example

example:x:1001:

code with ❤️ in GitHub

Conclusion

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