Trouble with using variables for ec2 tags

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1

I'm trying to create a VPC with certain tags which are derived from
variables. I feel like I can't find the right YAML/Jinja/whatever
syntax to make it work though.

At first I tried setting them in the resource_tags directly when using
the ec2_vpc module like so:

   - name: Create VPC for new environment
      local_action:
        module: ec2_vpc
        state: present
        cidr_block: 10.0.0.0/16
        resource_tags: { "Name": "marketplace-{{ environment }}" }
        region: "{{ aws_region }}"
        dns_hostnames: true
        dns_support: true
        internet_gateway: true
        validate_certs: true
        instance_tenancy: default
        wait: true
        subnets:
        route_tables:
      register: new_vpc

While this executes without errors it results in a VPC with the Name
tag of "marketplace-{}" which is obviously not what I want.

And if my Name tag starts out with a "{" like "{{ environment
}}-marketplace" then I get this error:

failed: [localhost] => {"failed": true, "parsed": false}
invalid output was: Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/mpeters/.ansible/tmp/ansible-tmp-1403121708.45-114116167152383/ec2_vpc",
line 2001, in <module>
    main()
  File "/home/mpeters/.ansible/tmp/ansible-tmp-1403121708.45-114116167152383/ec2_vpc",
line 599, in main
    (vpc_dict, new_vpc_id, subnets_changed, changed) =
create_vpc(module, vpc_conn)
  File "/home/mpeters/.ansible/tmp/ansible-tmp-1403121708.45-114116167152383/ec2_vpc",
line 278, in create_vpc
    previous_vpc = find_vpc(module, vpc_conn, id, cidr_block)
  File "/home/mpeters/.ansible/tmp/ansible-tmp-1403121708.45-114116167152383/ec2_vpc",
line 240, in find_vpc
    if resource_tags and
set(resource_tags.items()).issubset(set(vpc_tags.items())):
TypeError: unhashable type: 'dict'

So I though, maybe ec2_vpc does run the Jinja templating on the values
in the resource_tags dictionary. So I then tried to create the VPC
with a dummy name tag, save it's vpc_id and then use ec2_tag to add
the tags in a separate task:

    - name: Tag the new VPC
      local_action: ec2_tag resource={{ new_vpc.vpc_id }} region={{
aws_region }} state=present
      args:
        tags:
          Name: "marketplace-{{ environment }}"

But this results in the same thing (vpc with a Name tag of
"marketplace-{}" instead of something like "marketplace-branch-XYZ".

Am I confused about the YAML/Jinja syntax to accomplish what I want or
is using variables in EC2 tags not supported? And if it's not
supported would pull requests to add it be something folks would like?

Thanks

2

This is definitely the same YAML parsing error, but because it’s happening in the complex args it doesn’t seem to be triggering the same error detection/handling code. Could you please open a github issue for this as well?

Thanks!

3

I've filed it as 2 separate issues since they could be related but
different (one completing but with the wrong results and the other
failing with the traceback):

https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/7833
https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/7835

But I'm still a bit confused about the why the first attempt I
mentioned is failing. It's not throwing the traceback, it's just
giving weird results. Is this still a YAML error? Can I write my YAML
in a way that doesn't trigger this problem? Or is there a limit on
which values can be templated?

Thanks,

4

Already got this on github, yes, but the problem is the ‘environment’ variable in Ansible is reserved.

The “environment” keyword stores variables here.

We may consider changing this to ansible_environment as this occasionally happens.