Issue with 'when' conditional

[Dave Florek]

Hi,

I keep getting errors related to my 'when' conditionals in my following playbook:

---

- hosts: all

  become: yes

  vars_prompt:

   - name: "remove_user"

     prompt: "Type name of user to delete:"

     private: no

#     when: remove_user != "root"

  tasks:

   - name: Create new user account

     command: "userdel {{ remove_user }}"

        when: "{{remove_user}}" != "root"

Ansible prompts me that my not equals indicator needs to be in quotes but I know that's wrong. I'm trying to add a check to where the playbook won't execute if the root account is specified. Any ideas?

[Brian Coca]

conditionals apply to tasks, not vars_prompt, which is not a task.

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Brian Coca

[Dave Florek]

Hi Brian,

Thanks for the reply. After error testing, I commented out the conditional in vars_prompt and reinserted it right after the task command, however it's not liking the logic in my when-statement. Do you happen to know where I'm running into an error? I'm trying to add an exception to prevent the script from running if a user specifies the wrong account to delete such as 'root'.

I took out the quotes and brackets from the remove_user variable, but after running the playbook kicked back this message:

ERROR! Syntax Error while loading YAML.

The offending line appears to be:

     command: "userdel {{ user_to_remove }}"

       when: user_to_remove != "root"

       ^ here

[Brian Coca]

when is a 'task' keyword, there you are making it an option for the
command module, unindent.


- command: "userdel {{ user_to_remove }}"
when: user_to_remove != "root"


also i recommend using the 'user' module instead.



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Brian Coca