How to ignore jinja2 braces {{}} in j2 template file

Question

I have a j2 file that i want to edit and copy to my remote server (as apart of my ansible play). The file has several 3 variables indicated by braces {{ }}. How can I only target the 2nd variable named {{ bar }} and ignore the other 2 in the file so they're left alone and copied to my remote server? For example, my test.j2 file contains:

line 1 {{ foo }}
line 2 {{ bar }}
line 3 {{ foo2 }}

Can I explicitly address {{ bar }} variable in my ansible playbook? If so, how would i write it (syntactically) in my ansible playbook?

score 9 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 05 '17 at 11:58

What follows isn't something I would recommend, but if you need to template only bar and nothing else (or if bar is always templated first before the rest), you can probably use the {% raw %} block:

{% raw %}line 1 {{ foo }}{% endraw %}
line 2 {{ bar }}
{% raw %}line 3 {{ foo2 }}{% endraw %}

Basically the idea is to mark non-bar variables as raw so that jinja doesn't template them.

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 30 '20 at 09:07

3

yet another alternative:

line 1 {{ '{{foo}}' }}
line 2 {{ bar }}
line 3 {{ '{{foo2}}' }}

answered Apr 30 '20 at 09:07

Chris Maes

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This is the tidiest one here, should be the accepted answer! Thanks – Matt Sep 28 '21 at 11:39

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 05 '17 at 15:54

You can use the {% raw %} block as @bow mentions or there's also a shorthand for smaller chunks of code, it's shorter but not necessarily more readable than just using a raw block.

line 1 {{ '{{' }} foo {{ '}}' }}
line 2 {{ bar }}
line 3 {{ '{{' }} foo {{ '}}' }}

http://jinja.pocoo.org/docs/2.9/templates/#escaping

How to ignore jinja2 braces {{}} in j2 template file

3 Answers3