ansible role meta, templated role dependency.

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1

Hi all,

I have a bunch of nested roles for a specific project.

I’m trying to dynamically invoked roles based on variable I have in the inventory.
For example, let’s say I have a foo variable that is defined for every hosts, the following will fail:

#roles/A/meta.yml

dependencies:

  • { role: “B/{{foo}}” }

I would expect that it would load the roles in roles/B/, but rather I have the following error:

ERROR! ‘foo’ is undefined.

Strange things, If I invoke foo as a play variable like this:

  • hosts: srv
    gather_facts: True
    vars:
    foo: “bar”
    roles:
  • { role: A }

It correctly loads and execute roles/B/bar…

So it seems to not expand inventory variable when passing them to “role” directive… Is this an expected behavior ? Is there any workaround ? This is kind of annoying because I wanted to dynamically load roles based on inventory variables rather than relying on conditional include using plenty of “when:” statement in the meta directive…

Best regards,

Lionel.

2

Anyone ?

3

Made some progress by looking at the code.

In: lib/ansible/playbook/role/definition.py

if self._variable_manager:
all_vars = self._variable_manager.get_vars(play=self._play)
templar = Templar(loader=self._loader, variables=all_vars)
if templar._contains_vars(role_name):
role_name = templar.template(role_name)

Looks like that the variables are expanded from the play context, not from the inventory which is not what I want in this case.
I want variables from the inventory to be expanded.

Is there any way to extend that behavior to include inventory variable ?

Best regards,

Lionel.