Ansible: Generic package manager

Heyho!

In this short post I wanted to show you how to use the ansible package module. Have you ever ended up writing a bunch of when statements for different distributions just to use the right package manager? You can use the ansible package module instead, it will automatically choose the right package manager for you:

- hosts: all
  tasks:
    - name: Install vim
      ansible.builtin.package:
        name: vim
        state: present
        update_cache: true

As the module is used as "proxy module" and redirects all parameters you specify to it to the target module (apt, yum...) we can add "update_cache" to update the specific package manager cache.

EDIT: update_cache was not missing in docs - the package module interacts as proxy module which can pass all parameters to the target module.

Hope you find this useful!

Best regards

Mow