Automating Dynamic Time Date Facts with Ansible

How to use the set_fact module and lookup plugin to set Ansible date.

Introduction

In the realm of automation and infrastructure management, Ansible stands out for its simplicity and power, enabling IT professionals to automate a wide array of tasks efficiently. One of the lesser-discussed yet powerful features of Ansible is its ability to set facts dynamically during playbook execution. This capability can be particularly useful when you need to generate values on the fly, such as capturing the current date and time.

A practical application of this is setting a fact to hold the current date and time, which can be used for various purposes such as timestamping files, creating backup directories with the date, or logging. Let’s delve into how you can leverage Ansible’s set_fact module along with the lookup plugin to achieve this.

Understanding set_fact and lookup

Before we dive into the example, it’s essential to understand the two key components we’ll be using: ansible.builtin.set_fact and lookup.

• ansible.builtin.set_fact: This module is used to set new variables on a host-by-host basis during playbook execution. These variables will be available for the…