Well, I think it was originally designed with server-side html templating in mind. It works great for that purpose. In the case of thread OP, that template is

Well, I think it was originally designed with server-side html templating in mind. It works great for that purpose. In the case of thread OP, that template is pretty messy, yes. In ansible, I would just create a custom module or action plugin in python to spit out whatever it is I need. I don't know how flexible salt is in this regard, but ansible is quite flexible. For simple cases, jinja works great if you're just doing a find/replace type operation in yaml.