Need help about Ansible block syntax

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1

Dear all,

I am quite new to Ansible and try to “make a tour”…
I am using ansible 2.4.2.0 with cygwin64 on Win7.

I am currently make a personal training and find that I could use a block to “enclose” (ok, perhaps wrong term) a couple of task that have some common “properties” (like become_user: root …).
The idea is to change this :

`

`

2

block does not support ALL the features of a simple task so this may be your issue. For example, it may not support notify, but you’ll need to look at this.

3

Notify should go after each of the tasks.
You could set a fact in the block then check that and notify afterwards though

4

Thanks all for your help.
I have been really bored with the block… but I finally succeed. The ansible / yaml syntax is not always straightforward to understand (or I lack some skills).

I went back to the ansible block documentation, and make a trial replacing my main.yml file with the example on the page, i.e. :

`
cat roles/devTools/tasks/main.yml
tasks:

  • name: Install Apache
    block:
  • yum: name={{ item }} state=installed
    with_items:
  • httpd
  • memcached
  • template: src=templates/src.j2 dest=/etc/foo.conf
  • service: name=bar state=started enabled=True
    when: ansible_distribution == ‘CentOS’
    become: true
    become_user: root

`

And I still get an error saying that the role must contain a list of task :

`
ERROR! The tasks/main.yml file for role ‘devTools’ must contain a list of tasks

The error appears to have been in ‘/home/jeanlupi/centos_test/myKnowledge/devOps/playbook/roles/devTools/tasks/main.yml’: line 1, column 1, but may
be elsewhere in the file depending on the exact syntax problem.

The offending line appears to be:

tasks:
^ here

`

Ok… I removed “tasks” (don’t clearly understand why it must not be there…) and the problem disappeared.
After several other syntax errors (probably not totally sticked to block), I succeeded with :

`
cat roles/devTools/tasks/RedHat.yml

  • name: Update Red Hat machine
    block:
  • yum: update_cache=yes name=“*” state=latest
    notify: “restart {{ ansible_os_family }} host”
  • yum: name=“{{item}}” state=present
    with_items: “{{ toolList }}”
    notify: "restart {{ ansible_os_family }} host"
    when: ansible_pkg_mgr == ‘yum’
    become: true
    become_user: root

`

As mentioned in the answers, notify must not be set at block level, but after each enclosed task.

Thanks for your help.
Have a nice day.
JiElPe

5

'tasks' is a property of a play, it should ONLY appear at the play level