Thanks so much Kal, that did the trick. I suspected something like that was
possible but I couldn't find a good example.
Being new to ansible the syntax has been a bit frustrating to muddle
through which is part of what had me stumped here. The many real world
examples in the documentation are very helpful but it's difficult to find a
straight description of how things work. I suspect it's because there is
assumption that YAML is described elsewhere but it would be helpful if
there was a formatting/syntax guide was direct explanations instead of
relying on examples. For example, in this case ${variable} is behaving
differently than {{variable}} and my initial searching isn't revealing
exactly what the differences are without having to infer it from a
collection of examples.
On Tuesday, January 7, 2014 2:32:48 PM UTC-6, Kahlil Hodgson wrote:
>
> Looks like you want to look up a package version by package name:
>
> ## Vars file
> version_for_package:
> foo: 1.1.19-1
> bar: 3.11.0-6
> baz: 6.11.1-1
> ...
>
> ## Task
> - name: update packages
> action: yum name={{ item }}-{{ version_for_package[item] }}
> state=present
> with_items: packages
>
> Kahlil (Kal) Hodgson GPG: C9A02289
> Head of Technology (m) +61 (0) 4 2573 0382
> DealMax Pty Ltd (w) +61 (0) 3 9008 5281
>
> Suite 1415
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>
> "All parts should go together without forcing. You must remember that
> the parts you are reassembling were disassembled by you. Therefore,
> if you can't get them together again, there must be a reason. By all
> means, do not use a hammer." -- IBM maintenance manual, 1925
>
>
>
> On Wed, Jan 8, 2014 at 7:20 AM, Michael DeHaan
> <mic...@ansibleworks.com<javascript:>>
> wrote:
> > Not sure why you are keeping the list of multiple versions in there, but
> > sounds like you should define a nested datastructure or an array or
> > something.
> >
> >
> >
> > On Tue, Jan 7, 2014 at 2:17 PM, Richard Schick
> > <richard...@gmail.com<javascript:>>
>
> > wrote:
> >>
> >> Greetings,
> >> We have long list of packages with versions that change frequently,
> those
> >> packages need to be installed on quite a lot of servers but each server
> >> needs a different combination of those packages. Defining a role or set
> of
> >> group vars that lists each package and it's version works fine except
> that
> >> managing the versions is very unwieldy because the versions change
> daily and
> >> we need to maintain parallel stacks of servers that have different
> package
> >> versions.
> >>
> >> The way I have it working is with a central list of all packages in a
> var
> >> file with their versions, then group var files that list the packages
> that
> >> need to be installed. The play iterates over the central package list
> for
> >> each item in the group vars file to find a name match and grab the
> version.
> >> This is working great except for one highly annoying issue, when the
> >> playbooks run it outputs 'skipping' for each package from the central
> file
> >> that isn't matched to the current item in the group var list. With
> many
> >> dozen packages and many dozen hosts this results in an overwhelming
> stream
> >> of 'skipping' messages, it also seems like it's fairly inefficient and
> could
> >> eventually run into scale issues.
> >>
> >> Here is roughly how it's setup:
> >> =============================
> >> The central file with versions
> >> =============================
> >> packages.yml:
> >> package_versions:
> >> - { name: "foo", version: "1.1.19-1" }
> >> - { name: "bar", version: "3.11.0-6" }
> >> - { name: "baz", version: "6.11.1-1" }
> >> - { name: "blah", version: "3.8.0-1" }
> >> - { name: "bleep", version: "3.10.0-1" }
> >> - { name: "bloop", version: "0.11.1-1" }
> >>
> >> =============================
> >> Group vars
> >> =============================
> >> group_vars/host1:
> >> ---
> >> packages:
> >> - foo
> >> - baz
> >> - bleep
> >>
> >> group_vars/host2:
> >> ---
> >> packages:
> >> - bar
> >> - blah
> >> - bleep
> >>
> >> group_vars/host3:
> >> ---
> >> packages:
> >> - bar
> >> - foo
> >> - bleep
> >>
> >> =============================
> >> The task
> >> =============================
> >> - name: update packages
> >> action: yum name=${item.name}-${item.version} state=present
> >> with_items: package_versions
> >> when: item.name in ${ packages }
> >>
> >>
> >> So that works but I would be a lot happier if it didn't iterate over
> the
> >> full central list of packages for each item and instead used the
> package
> >> name from the group vars as a key to grab the version from that central
> >> list. I haven't been able to find a way to grab a key value pair out
> of a
> >> list by directly referencing the key and hopefully I'm just missing
> >> something simple.
> >>
> >> Any help would be greatly appreciated, I'm drowning in 'skipping'
> >> messages.
> >>
> >> --
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> >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Michael DeHaan <mic...@ansibleworks.com <javascript:>>
> > CTO, AnsibleWorks, Inc.
> > http://www.ansibleworks.com/
> >
> > --
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