# var\_prompt & dynamic default values

**URL:** <https://forum.ansible.com/t/var-prompt-dynamic-default-values/24284>\
**Category:** Ansible Project\
**Created:** [April 21, 2017, 3:28pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/var-prompt-dynamic-default-values/24284 "2017-04-21T15:28:09Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Mike\_Kingsbury](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e95f7d/32.png) [@Mike\_Kingsbury](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Mike_Kingsbury)\
**Post date:** [April 21, 2017, 3:28pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/var-prompt-dynamic-default-values/24284/1 "2017-04-21T15:28:09Z")

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I’m just getting started, but I haven’t stumbled across a good solution to this problem. In the case of deploying our software stack to a group of nodes, we’re using var\_prompt to ask a series of questions about the environment. What would be really nice and elegant is a manner to save the previous run’s inputted values as defaults for the prompts in the next run. Anyone have a good solution for this? I think I can write out the data during run #1, but I don’t know how to read it back in for run #2 when the var\_prompt section is being evaluated. I know as a complete alternative there’s the ability to do either extra\_vars on the command line or include\_vars in tasks, but I’m trying to stay away from that at the moment.

thanks  
-mike