Ansible role - EL Patching

Apply OS patches on Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and other Red Hat derivatives (e.g. CentOS, Rocky, Alma, Fedora). You can decide which patching method you want to use. There are 3 methods:

• all - Apply all patches on target a host
• security - Apply only security patches on target a host
• bugfix - Apply only bugfix patches on target a host

I recommend visiting the blog post for detailed information, usage example, and my recommendation.

Requirements

Only dnf must be available on the target machine.

Role Variables

• Default Variables. Usually, there is no need to change this but rather overwrite the value in host_vars or group_vars if required.

Variable Name	Default Value	Description
el_patching_required_packages	"yum-utils"	It is required to install yum-utils as this role verifies reboot with needs-restarting.
el_patching_auto_reboot	false	By default do not reboot the target host. Only verify if a reboot is required.
el_patching_reboot_timeout	600	By default auto reboot is disabled but the default timeout value is set to 5 minutes. Value is in seconds.
el_patching_method	"security"	By default apply only security patches on the target host. Possible values "security"/"bugfix"/"all"

• group_vars or host_vars variables.

Variable Name	Example Usage	Required	Description
el_patching_exclude_packages	el_patching_exclude_packages:  - tar  - zip	No	Exclude packages during patching.
el_patching_update_cache	true	No	Force dnf to check if cache is out of date and re-download if needed.

Dependencies

No Dependencies

Example Playbook

Create the following playbook.

- name: Apply OS Patches
  hosts: your_patching_inventory_group_or_host
  become: true
  roles:
    - voidquark.el_patching

Example execution

• Normal Execution

ansible-playbook -i inventory/hosts playbook.yml

• If you want to run playbook in check mode

ansible-playbook -i inventory/hosts playbook.yml --check

License

MIT

Author Information

Created by VoidQuark