# What do you think of adding time-related facts?

**URL:** <https://forum.ansible.com/t/what-do-you-think-of-adding-time-related-facts/11751>\
**Category:** Ansible Project\
**Created:** [August 2, 2012, 2:28pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/what-do-you-think-of-adding-time-related-facts/11751 "2012-08-02T14:28:58Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 6\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Ernest0x](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/ed655f/32.png) [@Ernest0x](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Ernest0x)\
**Post date:** [August 2, 2012, 2:28pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/what-do-you-think-of-adding-time-related-facts/11751/1 "2012-08-02T14:28:58Z")

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What do you think of adding time-related vars in the ansible facts?

For example, it would be convenient if someone could use $ansible\_date  
as suffix/prefix of a backup file in a 'backup' action.

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**Author:** ![Michael\_DeHaan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/c4cdca/32.png) [@Michael\_DeHaan](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Michael_DeHaan)\
**Post date:** [August 2, 2012, 3:27pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/what-do-you-think-of-adding-time-related-facts/11751/2 "2012-08-02T15:27:28Z")

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It should not be done at fact level as the dates would be different per host.

Rather, it sounds like there should be a playbook level variable "time" that gets reset before each task is run, and that gets shoved somehow  
into the template dictionary data.

I do find this useful though, because you could easily do things like

# templates by Ansible on {{ time }}

at the top of the file.

So yes to this, but not with facts.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Ernest0x](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/ed655f/32.png) [@Ernest0x](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Ernest0x)\
**Post date:** [August 2, 2012, 4:21pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/what-do-you-think-of-adding-time-related-facts/11751/3 "2012-08-02T16:21:23Z")

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On the other hand, you may actually want exactly that behavior. For  
example, if you take a backup at the same time on different hosts that  
are in different timezones, it would make more sense to have appended to  
the backup files the local times of each host, so that local  
administrators know exactly how old their backups are and not be  
surprised with, let's say, backups that seem to have been taken in the  
future (although, Le Guin's ansible could perhaps do that :P).

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**Author:** ![Michael\_DeHaan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/c4cdca/32.png) [@Michael\_DeHaan](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Michael_DeHaan)\
**Post date:** [August 2, 2012, 5:10pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/what-do-you-think-of-adding-time-related-facts/11751/4 "2012-08-02T17:10:05Z")

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ok, I'll accept local\_time as a fact, but would want:

local\_epoch\_time -- seconds since 1970  
local\_time -- whatever ASCII format, must include the timezone offset

we can leave the other for later.

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**Author:** ![Will\_Thames](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/dc4da7/32.png) [@Will\_Thames](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Will_Thames)\
**Post date:** [August 2, 2012, 10:20pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/what-do-you-think-of-adding-time-related-facts/11751/5 "2012-08-02T22:20:18Z")

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Could we just make this more generic and allow the results of a command to be assigned to a var for a future command?

Also, it would be useful to have the idea of running a one-off task on the host running a playbook vs the task running on every target

So for something where date is always the same:

action: command local=true resultvar=singledate date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S

And where you want local time or different times

action: command resultvar=systemdate date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S

And then use $singledate or $systemdate in later tasks.

I’m sure none of the above is simple, just an idea for a different mechanism that is more widely applicable.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Michael\_DeHaan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/c4cdca/32.png) [@Michael\_DeHaan](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Michael_DeHaan)\
**Post date:** [August 2, 2012, 10:56pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/what-do-you-think-of-adding-time-related-facts/11751/6 "2012-08-02T22:56:00Z")

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> Could we just make this more generic and allow the results of a command to  
> be assigned to a var for a future command?

Returning the time in the setup data is useful because it wouldn't  
require an extra hop.

That being said, the "store result in variable thing" will come in 0.7.

> Also, it would be useful to have the idea of running a one-off task on the  
> host running a playbook vs the task running on every target

We're talking about 3 things in one email now, but the idea of running  
something on the localhost with info about the remote hosts is  
something that will be coming.

> action: command local=true resultvar=singledate date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S

It would be more like this:

action: foo  
local\_action: True # I need a much better word for this

not to be confused with connection: local

the variable storage stuff is also seperate and would be more like:

action: command date  
store\_as: date

again, this is about 4 separate things now 🙂