multiple entries for a variable

[Kathy L]

In our playbook, we are making changes to the chronyd.service file.  On several different Debian devices, that file is in two different locations:

    /lib/systemd/system/chronyd.service
    /etc/systemd/system/chronyd.service

We call the location using:

    chronyd_systemd[system_distro]

System_distro is something we've defined with the major and minor OS versions smashed together (Debian10, CentOS7, etc.)

In the vars/main.yml file we have:

   chronyd_systemd:

      Debian10: /etc/systemd/system/chronyd.service

      Debian11:  /lib/systemd/system/chronyd.service

Ideally we'd like something like this:

    chronyd-systemd:
       Debian11:  /lib/systemd/system/chronyd.service OR /etc/systemd/system/chronyd.service

How would we go about doing this?

[Dick Visser]

This should expand to what you want (untested):

"{{ chronyd_systemd[ansible_distribution ~ ansible_distribution_major_version] }}"

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[Kathy L]

Actually, that is how we define system_distro already.

I'm really interesting in how to do something like the following:

     chronyd-systemd:
           Debian11:  /lib/systemd/system/chronyd.service OR /etc/systemd/system/chronyd.service

In other words, for Debian 11, define two different locations to look at.

[Todd Lewis]

file lookups work on the controller, not the target hosts. So you'd be stuck doing a ansible.builtin.stat on those paths first, then some magic jinja expressions on the results. It gets messy, much messier than what you're already doing.

But, unless you're the creating a service yourself - and I mean the whole service, not just the systemd unit file - this is not the way to go. Systemd provides a mechanism for the sysadmin to override and/or add to the settings in a vendor- or distro-provided service unit. You should consider putting your overrides in /etc/systemd/system/chronyd.service.d/ and leaving the upstream service unit file(s) alone. This also preserves your mods and avoids conflicts across chronyd updates.
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Todd