Ansible Tips and Tricks ( Part 1 )

A little bit about myself, I am DevOps Engineer and I have around 4 years of experience in Ansible since version 2.2 / 2016. I have done 50+ projects in Ansible.

I will be sharing tricks that I learnt over time while using Ansible.

Trick 1: Variable Inside Another Variable

So let’s suppose you one variable or result which is being generated by some task. Now you want to use that Result / Variable Inside another variable to generate some value or another result.

"{{ variable_A {{ variable_B }} }}"

Above Syntax won’t work.

Let’s take an example and see.

Try 1:

I will add curly brackets inside another curly bracket like a lazy developer.

- hosts: localhost
  vars:
    v1: [1,2,3,4]
    v2: 2
  tasks:
    - debug: msg="{{ v1[{{ v2 }}] }}"
TASK [debug] ********************************************************************
fatal: [localhost]: FAILED! => {"msg": "template error while templating string: expected token ':', got '}'. String: {{ v1[{{ v2 }}] }}"}

Try 2:

I keep curly brackets inside another curly bracket but will add single quotes to inside brackets to make it separate.

- hosts: localhost
  vars:
    v1: [1,2,3,4]
    v2: 2
  tasks:
    - debug: msg="{{ v1['{{ v2 }}'] }}"
TASK [debug] ********************************************************************
fatal: [localhost]: FAILED! => {"msg": "The task includes an option with an undefined variable. The error was: 'list object' has no attribute '{{ v2 }}'\n\nThe error appears to be in 'projects/ansible-tricks/trick1.yml': line 10, column 7, but may\nbe elsewhere in the file depending on the exact syntax problem.\n\nThe offending line appears to be:\n\n  tasks:\n    - debug: msg=\"{{ v1['{{ v2 }}'] }}\"\n      ^ here\n"}

Try 3:

Ansible has a special syntax for it which is to use square brackets and without any curly brackets on the inside variable, Ansible Engine will automatically populate inside variable first then outside variable.

- hosts: localhost
  vars:
    v1: [1,2,3,4]
    v2: 2
  tasks:
    - debug: msg="{{ v1[v2] }}"
TASK [debug] ********************************************************************
ok: [localhost] => {
    "msg": "3"
}

It can be enhanced a bit more to make it simple to understand and faster execution.

Try 4:

Add Type of inside variable like Int / String / etc .

- hosts: localhost
  vars:
    v1: [1,2,3,4]
    v2: 2
  tasks:
    - debug: msg="{{ v1[v2 | int ] }}"
TASK [debug] ********************************************************************
ok: [localhost] => {
    "msg": "3"
}

Have a fun day! and Keep Learning.