'when' not working with 'with_items' ?

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1

I have this task in a play for group ‘dbservers’:

name: test
debug: msg=‘{{ is_master }}’
sudo: true
sudo_user: postgres
when: is_master
with_items: groups[‘dbservers’][1::]

I wrote this because I wanted only master ( which is groups[‘dbservers’][0] with hostname ‘pgserver-1’ ) to show the message for every slave.

is_master is evaluated before based on the hostname.

With 1 master and 1 slave it doesn’t work:

TASK: [database | test] *******************************************************
<…> ESTABLISH CONNECTION FOR USER: root
<…> ESTABLISH CONNECTION FOR USER: root
ok: [pgserver-2] => (item=pgserver-2) => {
“item”: “pgserver-2”,
“msg”: “False”
}
ok: [pgserver-1] => (item=pgserver-2) => {
“item”: “pgserver-2”,
“msg”: “True”
}

The first message shouldn’t be shown but be skipped. It’s like ‘when’ isn’t working but is_master is correctly evaluated. what am I doing wrong?

2

when works fine with with_items.

It is evaluated once per item.

This syntax “with_items: groups[‘dbservers’][1::]” is however, entirely invalid.

3

Curiously this syntax seems to be working. Should I change it anyway?

The problem finally seems to be that ‘when’ doesn’t get evaluated…This is how is_master is set:
is_master: “{{‘-1’ in inventory_hostname }}”
and gets a value of ‘True’ of ‘False’…Does it need to be ‘true’ or ‘false’ to work?
It worked with this:
when: is_master == ‘True’
but i don’t understand why, this code was working a few days ago and now it’s not…

Thanks

4

" is_master: “{{‘-1’ in inventory_hostname }}”

is_master: “-1 in inventory_hostname”

when: “{{ is_master }}”

That should cause your extra level of indirection.