creating users - how to filter a vars dict from within a given playbook per inventory class

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1

Hi folks,

I have a presumably typical setup - see end for the yaml files.

- a generic role to create users
- a vars file with all the users across my environment

Which works fine if I want all users on every box.

However I need to apply only a subset of these users to various systems
- for example, all boxes should have the ansible user created, but only
webservers should have the additional ops user created.

I couldn't find a way from within the playbook only to require the
ansible user from `vars/users.yml`. So I tried instead splitting the
vars up into 2 separate files in the playbook:

```bootstrap.yml

2

Maybe something like

when: ‘webservers’ in group_names

Might help.

3

This is the crux of the issue - I can't put this in the vars file, so
how does one keep the roles and vars info reusable? I should be able to
constrain these only in the final playbook.

Here's the error I got trying to limit to a specific user, ignoring the
inventory class for the moment as it's a trivial when: clause.

{"failed": true, "msg": "The conditional check 'users.item.key ==
\"ansible\"' failed. The error was: error while evaluating conditional
(users.item.key == \"ansible\"): 'dict object' has no attribute 'item'"}

& the playbook:

- name: deploy and configure site
  hosts: all
  become: yes
  gather_facts: yes
  vars_files:
    - vars/users.yml
  roles:
    - { role: users, when: users.item.key == "ansible" }

Any other suggestions? Different approaches?

End goal is that on all hosts we have ansible user created, and on Y
hosts, a subset of all hosts, we have additional users set up

A+
Dave