# Help me understand what's going on here with ELB register/deregister

**URL:** <https://forum.ansible.com/t/help-me-understand-whats-going-on-here-with-elb-register-deregister/17923>\
**Category:** Ansible Project\
**Created:** [April 8, 2015, 2:25am UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/help-me-understand-whats-going-on-here-with-elb-register-deregister/17923 "2015-04-08T02:25:44Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![atedja\_nm](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ea5d25/32.png) [@atedja\_nm](https://forum.ansible.com/u/atedja_nm)\
**Post date:** [April 8, 2015, 2:25am UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/help-me-understand-whats-going-on-here-with-elb-register-deregister/17923/1 "2015-04-08T02:25:44Z")

</div>

I am trying to understand the sample code here about ELB register/deregister instances:

[http://docs.ansible.com/ec2\_elb\_module.html](http://docs.ansible.com/ec2_elb_module.html)

```auto
  - name: Instance De-register
    local_action:
      module: ec2_elb
      instance_id: "{{ ansible_ec2_instance_id }}"
      state: 'absent'

```

```auto
  - name: Instance Register
    local_action:
      module: ec2_elb
      instance_id: "{{ ansible_ec2_instance_id }}"
      ec2_elbs: "{{ item }}"
      state: 'present'
    with_items: ec2_elbs

```

So what’s going with ec2\_elbs: “{{ item }}” What is “item”?

What is with\_items: ec2\_elbs? What does ec2\_elbs? I am trying to debug this by printing ec2\_elbs, but it doesn’t seem that it allows me to use debug with local\_action.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![James\_Cammarata](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/7c8e57/32.png) [@James\_Cammarata](https://forum.ansible.com/u/James_Cammarata)\
**Post date:** [April 8, 2015, 3:48pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/help-me-understand-whats-going-on-here-with-elb-register-deregister/17923/2 "2015-04-08T15:48:02Z")

</div>

This is a loop:

[http://docs.ansible.com/playbooks\_loops.html](http://docs.ansible.com/playbooks_loops.html)