title: Manage whole crontab files in Ansible
body: <p>I have a crontab containing around 80 entries on a server. And I would like to manage that crontab using Ansible.</p>
  
  <p>Ideally I would copy the server's crontab to my Ansible directory and create an Ansible task to ensure that crontab is set on the server.</p>
  
  <p>But the <a href="http://docs.ansible.com/cron_module.html" rel="noreferrer">cron module</a> only seems to manage individual cron entries and not whole crontab files.</p>
  
  <p>Manually migrating the crontab to Ansible tasks is tedious. And even if I find or make a tool that does it automatically, I feel the YAML file will be far less readable than the crontab file.</p>
  
  <p>Any idea how I can handle that big crontab using Ansible?</p>