Learning Ansible 2 - Second Edition

Variables in playbooks

Sometimes it is important to set and get variables in a playbook.

Very often, you'll need to automate multiple similar operations. In those cases, you'll want to create a single playbook that can be called with different variables to ensure code reusability.

Another case where variables are very important is when you have more than one datacenter and some values will be datacenter-specific. A common example are the DNS servers. Let's analyze the following simple code that will introduce us to the Ansible way to set and get variables:

--- 
- hosts: all 
  remote_user: fale 
  tasks: 
  - name: Set variable 'name' 
    set_fact: 
      name: Test machine 
  - name: Print variable 'name' 
    debug: 
      msg: '{{ name }}' 

Let's run it in the usual way:

$ ansible-playbook ...