Nested looping with dict/sub-list

[Duncan Hutty]

I'm having a bit of difficulty with getting the behaviour that I want in
as concise a way as I think should be possible.

Here's the point:
I'm having trouble with iterating over a hash where the value for one of
the keys is itself a list. Is this possible with Ansible? Or would I
need to write a custom iterator?

I think that, having read the docs on how Ansible does looping
(http://docs.ansible.com/playbooks_loops.html) that I must be
misunderstanding something, so I'm asking for illumination concerning
the general case - this repository problem is just an example.


I want to configure /etc/apt/sources.list to contain:

deb http://mirrors.us.kernel.org/ubuntu/ precise main
deb http://mirrors.us.kernel.org/ubuntu/ precise universe
deb http://mirrors.us.kernel.org/ubuntu/ precise-updates main
deb http://mirrors.us.kernel.org/ubuntu/ precise-updates universe
deb http://mirrors.us.kernel.org/ubuntu/ precise-security main
deb http://mirrors.us.kernel.org/ubuntu/ precise-security universe

My desired approach is to have a role called 'repositories', because I
will need to take care of multiple platform versions/releases and
non-distro/vendor repositories.

roles/repositories/defaults/main.yml:
---
# defaults file for repositories
apt_repositories:
vendor_base:
uri: "http://mirrors.us.kernel.org/ubuntu/"
suffix: ""
components:
- main
- universe
vendor_security:
uri: "http://mirrors.us.kernel.org/ubuntu/"
suffix: "-security"
components:
- main
- universe
vendor_updates:
uri: "http://mirrors.us.kernel.org/ubuntu/"
suffix: "-updates"
components:
- main
- universe


roles/repositories/tasks/main.yml
---
# tasks file for apt repository config
- name: "install standard apt repositories"
apt_repository: repo="deb {{item.value.uri}} {{
ansible_distribution_release }}{{ item.value.suffix }}" state=present
with_dict: apt_repositories


With the task as above, I get:

deb http://mirrors.us.kernel.org/ubuntu/ precise
deb http://mirrors.us.kernel.org/ubuntu/ precise-updates
deb http://mirrors.us.kernel.org/ubuntu/ precise-security

which is nearly there, but is missing the iteration over the list that
is the subelement 'components'. I have attempted to use
'with_subelements' and I think perhaps I just haven't managed the
correct incantation because I see in the debug output that the 'item'
dict _does_ contain my components list.

I've already managed to solve the immediate problem of getting the
desired repos configured on my machines by using 'with_nested' with
hard-coded _lists_ of suffixes and components and I realise that I could
iterate over my entire dict with sublist data structure with a jinja2
template (instead of using the apt_repository module), but I'm posting
for the general theory of iteration.

Thank you for reading this far,
Duncan Hutty

[Matt Martz]

I'm guessing what you want is:

apt_repository: repo="deb {{item.value.uri}} {{ ansible_distribution_release }}{{ item.value.suffix }} {{ item.components|join(" ") }}" state=present

This just uses the 'join' filter to join that components list into a space separated string.

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Matt Martz
@sivel
sivel.net

[Duncan Hutty]

That's an interesting strategy for getting the sources.list.d
configured, but it relies on the fact that that line defining a deb
repository can take multiple components 'deb
http://mirrors.us.kernel.org/ubuntu/ precise main universe', so I'm no
clearer on the real question about iterating over a dict with a sub-list.


(although it also made me notice that I want to sort the dict and it's
not immediately obvious how to do so: "with_dict: apt_repositories |
dictsort" doesn't work - I think because dictsort yields a list of
key,value pairs not a real dict).

Thanks for the helpful reply!

Duncan Hutty