Ansible 2.4 is notable for a number of improvements and changes, but one that flew under my radar was the addition of a set of new openssl_* crypto-related modules.
The following modules were added in Ansible 2.4.0:
I recently had to build an Ansible playbook that takes in a massive inventory structure (read from a YAML file), modifies a specific key in that file, then dumps the file back to disk. There are some other ways that may be more efficient standalone (e.g. using a separate Python/PHP/Ruby/etc. script and a good YAML library), but since I had to do a number of other things in this Ansible playbook, I thought it would keep it simple if I could also modify the key inside the playbook.
I was scratching my head for a while, because while I knew that I could use the dict | combine() filter to merge two dicts together (this is a feature that was introduced in Ansible 2.0), I hadn't done so for a deeply-nested dict.
Recently, as I've been building more and more servers running Ubuntu 16.04, I've hit the following errors:
PLAY [host] ************************************************************************************************************
TASK [Gathering Facts] *************************************************************************************************
fatal: [1.2.3.4]: UNREACHABLE! => {"changed": false, "msg": "SSH Error: data could not be sent to remote host "1.2.3.4". Make sure this host can be reached over ssh", "unreachable": true}or:
/bin/sh: 1: /usr/bin/python: not foundThe former error seems to happen when you're running a playbook on an Ubuntu 16.04 host (with gather_facts: yes), while the latter happens if you're using a minimal distribution that doesn't include Python at all. The problem, in both cases, is that Python 2.x is not installed on the server, and there are two different fixes: