How to exclude files without extension to be parsed by ansible-playbook

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1

Hi everyone,

I started using ansible a few years ago and still learning every days.
At this time I’m working with hostvars as directory. Each host vars has a folder dedicated to datas.

hot_vars
  |- first_host
       |-data_folder
           - a_file_without_extension

When I run a playbook for this host, the file without extension is parsed by ansible-playbook .
This cause some issue because files could be OS conf files or binary.

I would like to know how is it possible to exclude files without extension or place in a specfic path to be parsed by ansible.

I’ve found ignore_extensions and I think most appropriate this one ignore_patterns

I tried multiple syntax on both without success.
I’ve searched some examples and didn’t find something usefull.
Maybe anyone could tell me what’s wrong with this ignore_patterns=['data_folder']

Any help would be appreciated.

Regards

2

Although I’ve never actually used the ignore_patterns or ignore_extensions configuration options, I will point out that their descriptions say

List of (extensions|patterns) to ignore when using a directory as an inventory source.

However, you aren’t using these directories as an inventory source. You’re using them as variable sources. So I wouldn’t expect those options to have any effect on files in ./host_vars or ./group_vars directories.

There should not be any OS configuration or binary files in your ./host_vars or ./group_vars directories. Such files should be in a ./files (or ./templates) subdirectory, probably inside a role.

I’d also recommend against having any files under ./host_vars or ./group_vars that don’t have an extension of either .yml or .yaml. We used to do that, but quickly gave up the practice upon discovering that ansible-lint ignored any ./host_vars or ./group_vars files that had no such extension. (I don’t know whether that’s still the case, and I have no interest in finding out the hard way now.)

I’m curious what problems you’ve been attempting to solve by placing non-vars files in either ./host_vars or ./group_vars. If you’d care to tell us more about that, I and others here would be happy to suggest some more canonical ways to achieve your goals.

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3

FWIW, files with a leading dot are ignored in host_vars. A quick and dirty solution is to rename a_file_without_extension to .a_file_without_extension

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4

Thanks @vbotka , to make it quick and dirty we renamed all our “problematic” folders with a leading dot.

5

Thanks @utoddl , you’re definitively right, I read too fast.
Those options were for inventory and not for variables.
I read your recommendations and I think we still have a lot to do to improve our way to work with ansible.
For the moment we’ll use the @vbotka proposal as a quick solution to achieve our goals.
I’ll need to rethink all our variable/inventory structure :wink:

A great thanks for your advices.

Regards