ansible 1.8 (devel 4c86bd3ca6) not reading group_vars?

Archives Ansible Project
1

Following the documentation at http://docs.ansible.com/intro_windows.html.

I setup an inventory file and group windows.
I setup a group_vars for for windows.

$ cat customer/windows-testing

[windows]
appserv.int.domain.com

$ cat group_vars/windows.yml
ansible_ssh_user: Administrator
ansible_ssh_pass: “Password”
ansible_ssh_port: 5986
ansible_connection: winrm

$ whoami
basictheprogram

$ ansible windows -i customers/windows-testing -m win_ping -vvvv

<appserv.int.domain.com> ESTABLISH CONNECTION FOR USER: basictheprogram on PORT 22 TO appserv.int.domain.com
appserv.int.domain.com | FAILED => FAILED: Authentication failed.

I don’t understand why ansible is attempting to ssh (port 22) as basictheprogram (me) installed of winrm to port 5986 as Administrator.

$ ansible --version
ansible 1.8 (devel 4c86bd3ca6) last updated 2014/10/21 12:09:14 (GMT -500)
lib/ansible/modules/core: (detached HEAD cb69744bce) last updated 2014/10/07 14:28:03 (GMT -500)
lib/ansible/modules/extras: (detached HEAD 8a4f07eecd) last updated 2014/10/07 14:28:06 (GMT -500)
v2/ansible/modules/core: (detached HEAD cb69744bce) last updated 2014/10/07 14:28:11 (GMT -500)
v2/ansible/modules/extras: (detached HEAD 8a4f07eecd) last updated 2014/10/07 14:28:15 (GMT -500)
configured module search path = None

2

I think your group_vars files should not have .yml extensions

3

​Given those paths:​

$ customer/windows-testing

$ group_vars/windows.yml

​Your group vars (current dir) are one level above your inventory​

​(within customer dir)
So they are not found..
​

4

​That is not a problem, could even be .yaml or .json​

lib/ansible/constants.py:# check all of these extensions when looking for
yaml files for things like
lib/ansible/constants.py:YAML_FILENAME_EXTENSIONS = [ "", ".yml", ".yaml",
".json" ]

5

ah, ok. Thanks.

6

I just experienced the same issue. ansible doesn’t seem to read group_vars, but ansible-playbook does. so my group_vars values are not used.

was this ever solved?

thanks

7

i would find that really strange as they both call the same inventory
code that is responsible for reading them.

8

I guess one difference could be location? group_vars can also live at the same level as the playbook, as opposed to alongside the inventory.

Without a playbook, I don’t think playbook level group_vars would be loaded.

9

Looking at some of my group_vars files, they have the yaml header i.e. they start with

10

Reading that again, it might not be too clear what I mean.

so instead of

$ cat group_vars/windows.yml
ansible_ssh_user: Administrator
ansible_ssh_pass: “Password”
ansible_ssh_port: 5986
ansible_connection: winrm

$ cat group_vars/windows.yml

11

It is optional, the header --- and footer .... are needed when you
want to have more than one yaml document per file.