with_dict fatal error after conditional include

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1

Ansible Community,

I’m using a conditional include statement to call a task file which has a task that uses a “with_dict” loop. When the include statement conditional fails, I’d like the task in “option.yml” to be skipped as the task would result in an error anyway.

When this is run, I get an error “with_dict expects a dict” since there is no dictionary “groups[{{ grps[2] }}]”. Why does Ansible try to evaluate the task at all since it should be skipped because of the include conditional?

Ideally, there would be a way to use a “with_items” loop with an include statement, but I am aware that that is intentionally not allowed.

(Note: I know this is a terrible example of how/when to use an include statement, but it shows the gist of how the error occurs. My actual usage is much more complicated.)

variables

2

I just ran into this same problem. Here is a much simpler test case:

  • debug: msg=“DICT {{item.key}}”
    when: undefined_dict is defined
    with_dict: undefined_dict

results in:

TASK: [consul | debug msg=“DICT {{item.key}}”] ********************************
fatal: [consul-client-1] => with_dict expects a dict

3

https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/10892

4

I just found https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/8546, which explains clearly that when is for each item in the loop. (Which I now recall reading in the docs). So this is clearly not a bug.

And the workaround in that issues works just fine for my case.

5

But related, and where this started for me, was running into this via a conditional include:

main.yml

  • { include: service_def.yml, when: consul_services is defined }

service_def.yml

  • name: Create service definitions

template: > …
with_dict: consul_services

I did not expect service_def.yml to even be loaded in this case, but it clearly does. What exactly is happening with task includes with a ‘when: false’? Does each task in the include get a hidden ‘when: false’ added to it? That would explain the behavior, but its definately not the behavior of least surprise to me.