In this tutorial, we will discuss how we can use Ansible to send emails which is valuable for notifying the system administrators or teams about the status of specific tasks.
Prerequisites:
- Installed Ansible
- Access to an SMTP Server
Setting Up the Email Configurations
To send the emails in Ansible, we use the mail module. Before we can use it, however, we need to do some configurations.
Install the Required Packages
Before we can use this module, we need to install the “smtplib” library. By default, you should have it installed with your default Python environment.
You also need to set up the SMTP server to send emails. You can also use Gmail for testing.
Requires SSL: Yes
Requires TLS: Yes (if available)
Requires Authentication: Yes
Port for SSL: 465
Port for TLS/STARTTLS: 587
Examples:
The following are some basic examples of sending emails using the mail module in Ansible.
Example 1: Basic Usage
The following playbook demonstrates how to use the mail module to send a basic email:
- name: Send email notification
hosts: localhost
tasks:
- name: Sending an email
mail:
host: smtp.gmail.com
port: 587
username: [email protected]
password: password
to: [email protected]
subject: Ansible Email Test
body: 'This is a test email from Ansible.'
secure: starttls
Note: Avoid hardcoded passwords in playbook. Consider using the Ansible Vault or environment variables.
Example 2: Including Attachments
We can use the attach parameter as shown in the following to send an email with attachments:
- name: Send email with attachment
hosts: localhost
tasks:
- name: Sending an email
mail:
host: smtp.gmail.com
port: 587
username: [email protected]
password: password
to: [email protected]
subject: Ansible Email with Attachment
body: 'Please find the attached report.'
attach: /var/log/apache.log
secure: starttls
Conclusion
We learned about the Ansible mail module to send emails which makes it easy to notify the relevant users about various system events.
