Can't access registered variable

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1

Hello Everyone

I have been using Ansible for about a year now and I can’t wrap my head around on idea of “registered variables”
I bought books, read online docs and looked at examples… but I still can’t use this important future properly.

Let me give you a example:

I want to find files that are older than 7 days:

`

  • name: Find backups that are older than 7 days
    find: paths=“/db-backups” age=“7d”
    register: list_of_db_backups

`

and I want to delete the files that I have found:

`

  • name: Cleanup backups that are older than 7 days
    file:
    name: “{{ item.path }}”
    state: absent
    with_items: list_of_db_backups.files

`

and I get error right away saying that “the field ‘args’ has an invalid value, which appears to include a variable that is undefined. The error was: ‘ansible.vars.unsafe_proxy.AnsibleUnsafeText object’ has no attribute ‘path’”

To be able to understand why ansible says object has no attribute “path”, I add a debug line to my playbook:

`

  • debug: var=list_of_db_backups

`

and I get this result:

`

TASK [ServerSetup/dev-mysql : debug] *******************************************
ok: [db] => {
“changed”: false,
“list_of_db_backups”: {
“changed”: false,
“examined”: 9,
“files”: [
{
“atime”: 1493059112.0,
“ctime”: 1493059112.0,
“dev”: 28,
“gid”: 1000,
“inode”: 136,
“isblk”: false,
“ischr”: false,
“isdir”: false,
“isfifo”: false,
“isgid”: false,
“islnk”: false,
“isreg”: true,
“issock”: false,
“isuid”: false,
“mode”: “0644”,
“mtime”: 1493059112.0,
“nlink”: 1,
“path”: “/db-backups/dev-2017-04-24T18:38:30Z.sql”,
“rgrp”: true,
“roth”: true,
“rusr”: true,
“size”: 397954,
“uid”: 1000,
“wgrp”: false,
“woth”: false,
“wusr”: true,
“xgrp”: false,
“xoth”: false,
“xusr”: false
}
],
“matched”: 1,
“msg”: “”
}
}

`

so clearly there is a variable named “path”

What am I doing wrong here? Can someone please clarify?
This is really important for me to take my ansible skills to the next level.

thank you kindly.

2

Hello Everyone

I have been using Ansible for about a year now and I can't wrap my head
around on idea of "registered variables"
I bought books, read online docs and looked at examples... but I still
can't use this important future properly.

You are almost there.

Let me give you a example:

I want to find files that are older than 7 days:

- name: Find backups that are older than 7 days
  find: paths="/db-backups" age="7d"
  register: list_of_db_backups

and I want to delete the files that I have found:

- name: Cleanup backups that are older than 7 days
  file:
    name: "{{ item.path }}"
    state: absent
  with_items: list_of_db_backups.files

Writing variable without {{ }} in with_items was allowed in older version of Ansible, in newer version {{ }} is required.
If you leave them out it's treated literally as the string "list_of_db_backups.files".

So with
   with_items: "{{ list_of_db_backups.files }}"

your code should work.

3

Thank you very much Kai Stian Olstad!
It was really useful.