Context based variable substitution in Ansible 2.0

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1

I have a role which contains tasks that are executed based on a variable set in a playbook. In my case I have a provisioning playbook and a configuration playbook. Both share a role named ebs_single. In this role I’ve tasks which should be executed only in the provisioning step and some other tasks which should be executed in the configuration step.

- name: Some provisioning task
**...**
  with_items: "{{ ec2.instances }}"
  register: ec2_volumes
when: ebs_single_provisioning


- name: Some configuration task
**...**
when: ebs_single_configuration

Prior to 2.0 this wasn’t an issue, because I’ve used a bare variable in with_items:

with_items: ec2.instances

But now if I try to fix the deprecation warning, I get an error that the variable ec2 is not found.

I’m not sure if this is an issue or if it’s by design. But how can I use such a concept with Ansible 2.0?

I’ve tried to default the variable if it’s not set. But this doesn’t work. I think also this would be the wrong way to fix this issue, because in the provisioning step an error should be thrown if the variable doesn’t exists.

with_items: "{{ ec2.instances|default(omit) }}"

Any suggestions?

Best regards,
Christian

2

Sorry, I forgot to mention that it fails in the configuration step, because the e2c variable is only set in the provisioning step.

Anyway, I got it working with the include statement.

- include: provisioning.yml
  when: ebs_single_provisioning

- include: configuration.yml
  when: ebs_single_configuration

Best regards,
Christian

3

Return an empty list and the task will be skipped, the when executes for EACH item, this ‘worked’ in 1.9 as the error was ignored and task skipped, not because the when was evaluated.

You can remove the when on the second task, for the with_ do this:

with_items: "{{ (ec2|default({})).instances|default([]) }}"