vars_prompt in Ansible

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1

Hi All,

I want to create Ansible script which will create user on linux servers, so I use vars_propt for entering values of username, groupname, shell. For groupname variable I want to use username’s value as a default value, but when I wrote default: {{username}} in my script I got syntax error, (I tried to write default: “{{username}}” , default: ‘{{username}}’ but in this cases script doesn’t understand that this is variable.

  • hosts: servers
    vars_prompt:

  • name: “username”
    prompt: “Enter new username”
    private: no

  • name: “groupname”
    prompt: “Please enter group name for user”
    private: no
    default: {{username}}

  • name: “usershell”
    prompt: “Please enter shell name for user”
    private: no
    default: “/bin/bash”

2

Hi,

I'm not getting a syntax error with

default: "{{ username }}"

It works (the default value is assigned if no input),
but the default value is not templated in the prompt.
This is printed instead:

Please enter group name for user: [{{ username }}]:

I believe it's related to this issue:
https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/16675

Cheers,
Marko
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3

Hi Marko,

When script printed "Please enter group name for user: [{{ username }}]:" I thought that it understood {{ username }} as a string, but after your reply I tried to debug groupname value it works thank you, but now I have other issue I want to use {{ username }} in my group's prompt msg, when I wrote:

- name: "groupname"
       prompt: "Please enter group name for user {{ username }}"
       private: no
       default: "{{ username }}"

msg of promt is:

Please enter group name for user {{ username }} [{{ username }}]:

I want to see typed user name instead of {{ username }}

4

You don't have hostvars available at that point, you can use extra_vars though.

If you want to default to the user currently running Ansible, you can do this:

default: "{{lookup('env', 'USER')}}"