Variable expansion and tags with the EC2 module

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1

I’m deploying a system to an number of machines in EC2 and am seeing some weird behavior with variable expansion

I have group_vars where I define a target version for my system and versions for components a, b and c. Typically a, b and c use the same target version, but I need the ability to override each
with a different version. I’ve been modelling this as a varaibles file all in group_vars containing

target_version: 12345
a_version: “{{target_version}}”
b_version: “{{target_version}}”
c_version: “{{target_version}}”

For the most part this works well, the following play

  • hosts: localhost
    connection: local
    tasks:
  • debug: var=target_version
  • debug: var=a_version

expands as expected to

TASK: [debug var=target_version] **********************************************
ok: [127.0.0.1] => {
“target_version”: “12345”
}

TASK: [debug var=a_version] ****************************************
ok: [127.0.0.1] => {
“a_version”: “12345”
}

However when I spin up my EC2 instance and retrieve the facts,

  • hosts: ec2cluster
    gather_facts: True
    user: ansible
    sudo: True
    tasks:

  • ec2_facts:

  • debug: var=hostvars[inventory_hostname]

these appear unexpanded as follows

“hostvars[inventory_hostname]”: {
“a_version”: “{{target_version}}”,

Also I pass in a variable containing instance tags that I’d like to add to the machine. I see that these get to the instance in the AWS console, but are not returned as ec2 facts like I’d have expected.

Are these bugs, or am I doing something wrong?

thanks,

Steve.

2

For the tags at least, it seems these get returned as part hostvar group_names formatted tag_name_value e.g. tag_sometag_somevalue.