Add --force to skip var_prompts and use default values

Archives Ansible Developer
1

Hi Developers,

It would be nice to have something like a --force or --batch option to skip var_prompts and just go ahead with default values.
What do you think?

Kind regards,
Chris

2

Wold definitely appreciate this. Something to automate or bypass vars_prompt. From here, looks like the developers don’t want a conditional prompt, but just completely skipping them would have the same effect. I want to/need to automate these vars in some cases. What’s the point in default values if you still have to manually assign it?

3

the default is there for people to hit 'enter' and not have to type,
it also provides an example of the expected input.

4

I know what its there for. I’m saying, if you still have to press enter… that’s not as useful as it could be. As the OP stated, a flag to automatically run through them would be useful.

5

you also have the option of using the pause module to prompt and get
user input, this is a task so you can use when: to skip it when
providing the info in some other way.

6

Thanks for the help. I can’t find anywhere to get the user’s input from a pause though. I can register what they enter?

7

I tried to redirect stdin to a file or /dev/null but that didn’t work as well - seems like ansible is actually opening the attached tty directly, which is unexpected.

8

I guess there are always other ways to accomplish something similar, but are there any other why not to introduce something like --batch / --force? It would certainly feel very natural to the *nix-community.

Kind regards,
Chris

9

yes, we can introduce that, i was just suggesting a workaround that is
available now. registering a var from the pause module and making it
conditional on the var not being defined seems like it would give you
what you need right now.

10

This does what I need it to, so thank you! I appreciate the workaround, hope a full solution is available sometime.

In case anyone is curious as to exactly how to do this:

`

  • name: Prompt that is skipped on extra-vars
    pause: prompt=“enter val1, you didn’t skip prompts”
    when: prompt_1 is not defined
    register: prompt_1

  • name: print off prompt_1
    debug: var=prompt_1.user_input

to skip over the prompt, pass --extra-vars '{"prompt_1": {"user_input": "test"}}'' on the command line.

`

Doing this completely replaces the need for vars_prompt, and let’s you specify a json file even to load the params from. Just make sure to change access to the vars to use var_name.user_input as that is what the prompt will store it in.