user parameter is not evaluated, failing the ssh

[Tzach Livyatan]

I tripped on the following, non consistent problem:

I have a playbook which start like:

- name: Clean Data Scylla

  hosts: "Scylla"

  user: "{{scylla_login}}"

  tasks:
...

scylla_login is defined in a different file, and for most playbook users this works fine, for other, ssh failed. 

When looking into /var/log/secure of the target server, I found:

Invalid user {{scylla_login}}

Look like the var was not evaluated!

Could this be related to ansible/python/os versio?

[Tzach Livyatan]

Answering my own question, in case some else have similar issue.

scylla_login is defined in inventories/ec2/group_vars/all.yaml

Although I used

ansible-playbook -i inventories/ec2/ playbook.yaml

The static file was not evaluated, similar to

https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/8605

I bypass the issue with

ansible-playbook -i inventories/ec2/ -e "@inventories/ec2/group_vars/all.yaml" playbook.yaml

It would have been nice if the original have failed, rather than sending the string, including "{{ }}" as a log in.