How to load variables Dynamically in Ansible

Well it's very easy to load variables by the use of when keywords, then why there is a need for the article as it is already in ansible docs.

Here we will use another approach to load the variables dynamically and in a customized way so that there is no need to use ‘when’ keyword the files will load automatically according to the os needs, here we use the ansible facts and also get to know the importance of tags.

Task

• Create a single role for configuring the webserver
• Must be able to configure more than one distributions

Here my instances are running on AWS which is of different distributions (RedHat and Ubuntu). Now here the main challenge is of the remote user which is different for the different os. So, how we can dynamically load the remote_user?

We can solve this challenge by the use of tags, with each host there is a lot of variables attached with it, and one of them is tags for ex. in both the os i have attached two tags (user, name)

Tags for RedHat distribution

name =  webserver
user = ec2_user

Tags for Ubuntu distribution

name = webserver
user = ubuntu

Now in remote_user we can pass the variable (ec2_tag_user) to provide the dynamic value of the user.

Task File

Here is the task file for the webserver configuration

---
# tasks file for dynamic_var
- include_vars: "{{ansible_distribution}}.yml"
- name: installing http webserver
  package:
     name: "{{ package_name }}"
     state: present
- name: starting service
  service:
     name: "{{service_name}}"
     state: started
- name: copying templates
  template:
     src: "{{ansible_distribution}}.html.j2"
     dest: "/var/www/html/index.html"
  notify: restart webserver

ansible_distribution is the part of ansible_facts which will tell us which distribution it belongs to, we can check the distribution by setup module

ansible all -m setup -a "filter=ansible_distibution"

You can see that there is no error while playing this add hoc cmd even though I haven't provided any remote_user in the configuration file, users were picked up automatically.

In the next we have to create the var files in the name of disributions

Var Files

RedHat.yml

package_name: httpd
service_name: httpd

Ubuntu.yml

package_name: apache2
service_name: apache2

Templates

RedHat.yml

Hello from {{ ansible_distribution}}

Ubuntu.yml

Hello from {{ ansible_distribution}}

Playbook

- hosts: tag_name_webserver
  tasks:
  - name: config webserver
    include_role:
       name: ../roles/dynamic_var

Remember the tag with name keyword which was the same for both the os, here I'm using the same tag to group the hosts (both RedHat and Ubuntu)

ansible-playbook test.yml

Aman-Rathi1/dynamic_var

For any queries and suggestions plz comment below

Thank You!!!