Using set facts and with items together in Ansible

Question

I m currently using Ansible 1 7 2   I have the following test playbook   --- - hosts  localhost   tasks    - name  set fact 1     set fact  foo     zero        - name  set fact 2     set fact  foo     foo         one        - name  set fact 3     set fact  foo     foo         two    three        - name  set fact 4     set fact  foo     foo            item            with items        - four       - five       - six    - debug  var foo   The first task sets a fact that s a list with one item in it   The subsequent tasks append to that list with more values   The first three tasks work as expected  but the last one doesn t   Here s the output when I run this   PLAY  localhost                                                                  GATHERING FACTS                                                                 ok   localhost   TASK   set fact 1                                                               ok   localhost   TASK   set fact 2                                                               ok   localhost   TASK   set fact 3                                                               ok   localhost   TASK   set fact 4                                                               ok   localhost    gt   item four  ok   localhost    gt   item five  ok   localhost    gt   item six   TASK   debug var foo                                                            ok   localhost    gt         foo              zero            one            two            three            six           PLAY RECAP                                                                      localhost                    ok 6    changed 0    unreachable 0    failed 0   Given the with items in task 4 and the fact that the output shows the task properly iterated over the items in that list  I would have expected the result to contain all the numbers zero through six  But that last task seems to only be evaluating set fact with the last item in the list   Is this possibly a bug in Ansible   Edit  I also just tested this on ansible 1 8 and the output was identical

User · Answer

I was hunting around for an answer to this question. I found this helpful. The pattern wasn't apparent in the documentation for with_items.

https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/39389

- hosts: localhost
  connection: local
  gather_facts: no

  tasks:
    - name: set_fact
      set_fact:
        foo: "{{ foo }} + [ '{{ item }}' ]"
      with_items:
        - "one"
        - "two"
        - "three"
      vars:
        foo: []

    - name: Print the var
      debug:
        var: foo

User · Answer

As mentioned in other people s comments  the top solution given here was not working for me in Ansible 2 2  particularly when also using with items    It appears that OP s intended approach does work now with a slight change to the quoting of item    - set fact  something     something     item         with items      - one     - two     - three   And a longer example where I ve handled the initial case of the list being undefined and added an optional when because that was also causing me grief   - set fact  something     something default         item         with items      - one     - two     - three   when  item name in allowed things item list

User · Answer

Updated 2018-06-08  My previous answer was a bit of hack so I have come back and looked at this again  This is a cleaner Jinja2 approach   - name  Set fact 4   set fact      foo      for i in foo result results      do foo append i       endfor      foo       I am adding this answer as current best answer for Ansible 2 2  does not completely cover the original question  Thanks to Russ Huguley for your answer this got me headed in the right direction but it left me with a concatenated string not a list  This solution gets a list but becomes even more hacky  I hope this gets resolved in a cleaner manner    - name  build foo string   set fact      foo string      for i in foo result results      i ansible facts foo item      if not loop last       endif     endfor     - name  set fact foo   set fact      foo      foo string split

User · Answer

There is a workaround which may help  You may  register  results for each set fact iteration and then map that results to list   --- - hosts  localhost   tasks    - name  set fact     set fact  foo item     item         with items        - four       - five       - six     register  foo result    - name  make a list     set fact  foo     foo result results   map attribute  ansible facts foo item     list        - debug  var foo   Output    lt  TASK  debug var foo  gt   ---------------------                       oo                                                 ----w                           ok   localhost    gt         var              foo                  four                 five                 six

User · Answer

Looks like this behavior is how Ansible currently works  although there is a lot of interest in fixing it to work as desired   There s currently a pull request with the desired functionality so hopefully this will get incorporated into Ansible eventually

User · Answer

Jinja 2 6 does not have the map function   So an alternate way of doing this would be   set fact  foo     for i in bar result results      i ansible facts foo item     endfor

[ansible] Using set_facts and with_items together in Ansible

Examples related to ansible