Hi guys
Ok it seems that I found the solution for the issue even though I don't
understand why it didn't work before.
At [1] in my previous post I posted the content of my
./roles/python/vars/main.yml file. There I have a hierarchical variable
'python.pip.pkgs'. When using it like this in the roles vars it works and I
can reference it in [0] however as soon as I move this to
./roles/python/defaults/main.yml it didn't work anymore ("'dict object' has
no attribute 'pkgs'"). As soon as I change python.pip.pkgs to
_python.pip.pkgs (basically anything but python in the beginning) it works.
I don't understand why I can use python as a variable name in role vars but
not in default vars. Is this a known limitation? If so shouldn't it be
mentioned in [5]? I'm using Ansible 2.3.1.0 in case it is important.
Cheers
Frieder
[5]
http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/playbooks_variables.html#what-makes-a-valid-variable-name
On Tuesday, August 15, 2017 at 6:00:37 PM UTC+2, Frieder Heugel wrote:
>
> Hi guys
>
> I have a role that installs Python on the target host ([0]). Different
> hosts require different Python libraries (some only need the basic set of
> libraries, others need completely different ones). My idea was to define a
> list of default packages in the role vars [1] and then provide the custom
> packages in the host_vars [2] whenever required. Unfortunately according to
> [3] the role vars have higher precedence over the host_vars so this
> explains why the custom packages in host_vars never got picked up.
>
> My next approach was to just have an additional task in the role that
> installs the host specific packages after the default ones. This works as
> long as all hosts have those variables defined. My goal however is to only
> specify a list of libraries for those hosts that differ from the default
> list. As you can see in [4] I tried two different things to work around
> missing host_vars for certain hosts: either try to fall back to an empty
> list via default([]) ) or use a when statement to check whether the
> variable is defined in host_vars or not. Both didn't work.
>
> Apart from that I also tried to move the content of python.pip.pkgs from
> ./roles/python/vars/main.yml to ./roles/python/defaults/main.yml but that
> didn't work either. Can defaults have hirarchical variables at all? It
> seemed like Ansible just ignored whatever I put in there.
>
> One last thing I was looking into is include_vars but I got stuck here
> with two issues: I have different environments
> (./inventories/{prod,staging,test}) and therefore the path to the host_vars
> is based on the inventory I provide when calling the playbook however I
> couldn't get the path or name of the selected inventory. The second issue
> is that I don't know how I can skip this include when the file doesn't
> exist.
>
> Could somebody shed some light on how I can define host specific variables
> that can overwrite role variables for a use case as described above. I
> googled for this but either it is so simple that nobody cares to write
> about it or I'm just bad at finding the solution.
>
> Any help is appreciated.
> Cheers
>
>
>
> [0] https://pastebin.com/raw/1XSk1t8Z
> [1] https://pastebin.com/raw/R0USFkEw
> [2] https://pastebin.com/raw/kTDF3zuS
> [3] http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/playbooks_variables.html
> [4] https://pastebin.com/raw/Emmb49qL
>
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