Phansible Role: Server

An Ansible Role that installs base packages and sets the timezone and locale on Ubuntu and Debian, created with Phansible in mind.

Requirements

• Ubuntu 22.04, 24.04, 26.04 or Debian 12, 13 (x86_64)
• Ansible >= 2.15 with the community.general collection (bundled with the ansible package, install it separately if you only have ansible-core)
• Root access or become on the target

Role Variables

All settings live in a single server dictionary, defined in defaults/main.yml:

server:
  timezone: UTC
  locale: en_GB.UTF-8
  packages: []

Key	Default	Description
server.timezone	UTC	Name under /usr/share/zoneinfo, written to /etc/timezone and linked to /etc/localtime
server.locale	en_GB.UTF-8	Locale generated with locale-gen (it is not set as the system default)
server.packages	[]	Extra apt packages to install at their latest version

curl, wget, ca-certificates, tzdata and locales are always installed. Ansible replaces dictionaries rather than merging them, so when you override server set all three keys.

Dependencies

None.

Example Playbook

- hosts: all
  become: yes
  vars:
    server:
      timezone: Europe/London
      locale: en_GB.UTF-8
      packages: [git, vim]
  roles:
    - role-server

License

This role is released under the terms of the license specified in the repository or if not specified, under the MIT license.

Author Information

This role was created in 2015 by The Phansible Team & Contributors, credits go also to Jeff Geerling, author of Ansible for DevOps and source of inspiration.