How to use Ansible to send an email using Gmail

A lot of people use Gmail daily to send and receive mail. The estimated number of global users in 2020 was 1.8 billion. Gmail works on the SMTP protocol over port number 587. In this article, I demonstrate how to configure your SMTP web server and send mail automatically from Ansible and using ansible-vault to secure passwords.

Encrypt your password file

The ansible-vault command creates an encrypted file where you can store your confidential details.

ansible-vault create secret.yml

[ You might also like: A sysadmin's guide to configuring an email server ]

Gmail setup

By default, Gmail doesn’t permit Less secure app access to their web server. For this, you have a solution: You can change the setting to enable Less secure app access.

Go to your Google account:

Click on Security and scroll down:

Click on Less secure app access and allow it:

Email Playbook

Configure the localhost as your web server, which is working on SMTP protocol over port 587. Username, password, and to fields are the Ansible modules. Subject and body are modules in which you can provide our subject and body content. The following is the email.yml file.

---
- hosts: localhost
  vars_files: secret.yml
  tasks:
  - name: Sending an email using Ansible
    mail:
      host: smtp.gmail.com
      port: 587
      username: [email protected]
      password: "{{ p }}"
      to: [email protected]
      subject: Email By Ansible
      body: Test successful
      delegate_to: localhost

Run the playbook

Run the playbook with the given command below. Use –ask-vault-pass flag while running the playbook with this keyword Ansible ask vault password and run your playbook.

ansible-playbook –ask-vault-pass email.yml

The email is sent successfully:

[ A free guide from Red Hat: 5 steps to automate your business. ] 

Wrap up

These steps demonstrate how to configure Gmail to send email messages from Ansible. In addition, you can secure your passwords in Ansible Vault.