Book Image

Mastering Ansible, Second Edition - Second Edition

By : Jesse Keating
Book Image

Mastering Ansible, Second Edition - Second Edition

By: Jesse Keating

Overview of this book

This book provides you with the knowledge you need to understand how Ansible 2.1 works at a fundamental level and leverage its advanced capabilities. You'll learn how to encrypt Ansible content at rest and decrypt data at runtime. You will master the advanced features and capabilities required to tackle the complex automation challenges of today and beyond. You will gain detailed knowledge of Ansible workflows, explore use cases for advanced features, craft well thought out orchestrations, troubleshoot unexpected behaviour, and extend Ansible through customizations. Finally, you will discover the methods used to examine and debug Ansible operations, helping you to understand and resolve issues. By the end of the book, the readers will be able to unlock the true power of the Ansible automation engine and will tackle complex real world actions with ease.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Mastering Ansible - Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Variable introspection


A common set of problems encountered when developing Ansible playbooks is the improper use or invalid assumption of the value of variables. This is particularly common when registering the results of one task in a variable and later using that variable in a task or template. If the desired element of the result is not accessed properly, the end result will be unexpected or perhaps even harmful.

To troubleshoot improper variable usage, inspection of the variable value is the key. The easiest way to inspect a variable's value is with the debug module. The debug module allows for displaying free form text on screen, and like with other tasks, the arguments to the module can take advantage of the Jinja2 template syntax as well. Let's demonstrate this usage by creating a sample play that executes a task, registers the result, and then shows the result in a debug statement using the Jinja2 syntax to render the variable:

--- 
- name: variable introspection demo 
...