Ansible variables

Image by Chuk Yong from Pixabay. When you ansible variables an Ansible ansible variablesyou sometimes need to pass data into your play at runtime. To do that, you can use a variablea sort of placeholder for data that's meant to be determined at some point in the future. There are lots of places to create variables for your playbooks, such as an inventory file, ansible variables, included files, or even dynamically in your playbook itself.

Ansible variables are dynamic values used within Ansible playbooks and roles to enable customization, flexibility, and reusability of configurations. They are very similar to variables in programming languages, helping you manage complex tasks more efficiently by allowing the same playbook or role to be applied across different environments, systems, or contexts without the need for hardcoding specific information. This blog post deep dives into Ansible Variables, which allow us to parametrize different Ansible components. Variables store values for reuse inside an Ansible project. If you are still learning how to use Ansible, you might also find helpful the introductory Ansible Tutorial or Working with Ansible Playbooks blog posts.

Ansible variables

You are reading an unmaintained version of the Ansible documentation. Unmaintained Ansible versions can contain unfixed security vulnerabilities CVE. Please upgrade to a maintained version. See the latest Ansible documentation. While automation exists to make it easier to make things repeatable, all of your systems are likely not exactly alike. On some systems you may want to set some behavior or configuration that is slightly different from others. Also, some of the observed behavior or state of remote systems might need to influence how you configure those systems. Such as you might need to find out the IP address of a system and even use it as a configuration value on another system. You might have some templates for configuration files that are mostly the same, but slightly different based on those variables. For best practices advice, refer to Variables and Vaults in the Best Practices chapter. Variable names should be letters, numbers, and underscores. Variables should always start with a letter.

List of hosts in the current play run, not limited by the serial. In this case, ansible variables, Equals will be printed as the ansible variables variable is equal as mentioned in the when condition. A dictionary is an unordered collection of mutable items where each item is represented as a key-value pair.

The concept of variables in Ansible is similar to that of variables in any programming language. In Ansible a value is assigned to a variable that can be then referenced in a playbook or on command line during playbook runtime. Variables can be used in playbooks , inventories , and at the command line as we have just mentioned. Variable names can only contain letters uppercase or lowercase letters or a combination of the two , underscores, and digits. In defining variables, some strings are reserved for special purposes and cannot qualify as valid variable names. These include Playbook Keywords and Python keywords.

For community users, you are reading an unmaintained version of the Ansible documentation. Unmaintained Ansible versions can contain unfixed security vulnerabilities CVE. Please upgrade to a maintained version. See the latest Ansible community documentation. Creating valid variable names. Defining variables in inventory. Defining variables in a playbook.

Ansible variables

With Ansible you can retrieve or discover certain variables containing information about your remote systems or about Ansible itself. Variables related to remote systems are called facts. With facts, you can use the behavior or state of one system as a configuration on other systems. For example, you can use the IP address of one system as a configuration value on another system. Variables related to Ansible are called magic variables. Package requirements for fact gathering. Information about Ansible: magic variables. Ansible facts are data related to your remote systems, including operating systems, IP addresses, attached filesystems, and more.

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Connecting to hosts: behavioral inventory parameters. This allows you, for example, to define firewall rules inside a playbook or role affecting only database servers:. Opinions expressed are solely his own. Parent groups are also known as nested groups or groups of groups. Group variables are a convenient way to apply variables to multiple hosts at once. You can use Jinja2 syntax in playbooks. This will only work inside a role. The name of the collection the task that is executing is a part of. You can apply variables to parent groups nested groups or groups of groups as well as to child groups. Every host will always belong to at least 2 groups all and ungrouped or all and some other group.

Ansible uses variables to manage differences between systems. With Ansible, you can execute tasks and playbooks on multiple different systems with a single command.

In addition, you can further narrow down and print out the value of a specific key. Example: Group by location. If you found that a little hard to understand, take a look at the ansible-examples repo on our github for a bit more about how all of these things can work together. Contents of the --limit CLI option for the current execution of Ansible. Setting variables in the main inventory file is only a shorthand. These variables cannot be set directly by the user; Ansible will always override them to reflect internal state. All rights reserved Privacy Policy Terms of Service. When passing variables with --extra-vars , you must escape quotes and other special characters appropriately for both your markup for example, JSON and for your shell:. With cached facts, you have access to variables and information about all hosts even when you are only managing a small number of servers. The next time fact gathering runs, your facts will include a hash variable fact named general with asdf and bar as members. To define a variable dynamically when you run a playbook, use the --extra-vars option along with the key and value of the variable you want to define. Inventory setup examples. The ansible-examples GitHub repository contains many examples of using variables in Ansible.