Using loops and lookup

[Thijn van der Schoot]

Hi,

Trying to create files based on sourcefile, and of course when this construction works.. i will use it on lots of things.

Version: ansible 2.4.2.0 I am trying to go through a source file ( in this case a list with users) and use every line i return in the file with the with_items loop to create files based on the each line. As you can  see the return is "user1\nuser2\nuser3\nuser4" i want to split the lines, so i can use the value/string of each individual line. I am still fairly new with Ansible, so I am probably missing something fundamental. What am i missing? Why can't i use stdout_lines on a lookup return? "When stdout is returned, Ansible always provides a list of strings, each containing one item per line from the original output."

$cat /etc/remote_users.txt

user1

user2

user3

user4

$cat /opt/ansible/roles/testing/vars/main.yml

---

users: "{{ lookup('file', '/etc/remote_users.txt') }}"

$cat /opt/ansible/roles/testing/tasks/google.yml

---

- debug: msg="the value of source text is {{ users }}"

- name: test files

file:

path: /home/thijn/{{ item }}

state: touch

mode: u=rw,g=r,o=r"

with_items: "{{ users.stdout_lines }}"

#with_items: "{{ users.stdout.split() }}"

#with_items: "{{ users.stdout.split('/n') }}"

Expected to have the following files created:

/home/thijn/user1

/home/thijn/user2

/home/thijn/user3

/home/thijn/user4

Actual output:

TASK [testing : debug] **************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************

ok: [minion2] => {

"msg": "the value of foo.txt is user1\nuser2\nuser3\nuser4"

}

TASK [testing : test files] *********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************

fatal: [minion2]: FAILED! => {"failed": true, "msg": "'ansible.vars.unsafe_proxy.AnsibleUnsafeText object' has no attribute 'stdout_lines'"}

PLAY RECAP **************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************

minion2 : ok=2 changed=0 unreachable=0 failed=1

[Thijn van der Schoot]

Right.. solved it :)
The problem was that the lookup returned a string and not a list.
so i changed the main.yml in vars from

users: "{{ lookup('file', '/etc/remote_users.txt') }}"

to
users: "{{ lookup('file', '/etc/remote_users.txt').split() }}"

and as there is no attribute in the list, i removed that well and just itereate of the list:
with_items: '{{users}}'
and not
with_items: "{{ users.stdout_lines }}"

problem solved.

[Thijn van der Schoot]

So the final result :D
TASK [testing : debug] **********************************************************************************************************************************************************************
ok: [minion2] => {
    "msg": "the value of foo.txt is [u'user1', u'user2', u'user3', u'user4']"
}

TASK [testing : test files] *****************************************************************************************************************************************************************
changed: [minion2] => (item=user1)
changed: [minion2] => (item=user2)
changed: [minion2] => (item=user3)
changed: [minion2] => (item=user4)