Ansible 1.9 - how to combine variables from different sources

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Hi all,

so far most of our servers were running RHEL 6. We are going to prepare some RHEL 7 servers soon and I am now
trying to rewrite our playbooks to be able cope with different releases of the same OS.
There is of course the “old” way of doing this like:

`

  • name: Install packages for RHEL6
    …
    when: ansible_distribution == RedHat and ansible_distribution_major_version == “6”

  • name: Install packages for RHEL7
    …
    when: ansible_distribution == RedHat and ansible_distribution_major_version == “7”

`

But I am looking for more “elegant” way of doing it (still with Ansible 1.9 !!!) like:

`

  • name: gather OS specific variables
    include_vars: “{{ item }}”
    with_items:

  • “{{ ansible_distribution }}/{{ ansible_distribution_major_version}}.yml”

  • common_list_of_packages_for_both_rhel_releases.yml

  • name: Install the required packages
    yum: name={{ item }} state=present
    with_items: packages_to_install
    when: packages_to_install is defined
    tags: common

wherepackages_to_install ``variable is defined and combined from both files.`

I guess it won’t work because with_items loop will overwrite the variable taken from

“{{ ansible_distribution }}/{{ ansible_distribution_major_version}}.yml”`

with values taken fromcommon_list_of_packages_for_both_rhel_releases.yml`

In ansible 2 we can use jinja2 "combine" filter but we still use Ansible 1.9 ....

Is there any elegant way in Ansible 1.9 to merge variables from different sources ?

Best regards
P