Possible to loop over conditional variables?

[Brian Huddleston]

Hi all, I'm pretty new to Ansible but trying to learn quickly.  I was building a role and wanted to perform a check for required variables, and was trying to put them in a loop instead of individually.  Here is what I am trying but I keep getting errors:

- name: Check for requirement variables

  fail: msg="Bailing out. This role requires {{ item }}"

  when: {{ item }} is undefined

  with_items:

    - nginx_domain

    - nginx_port

Instead of having declare them individually like this:

- name: Check for requirement nginx_domain

  fail: msg="Bailing out. This role requires 'nginx_domain'"

  when: nginx_domain is undefined

- name: Check for requirement nginx_port

  fail: msg="Bailing out. This role requires 'nginx_port'"

  when: nginx_domain is undefined

Is this possible? Or am I trying to fit a square peg in a round hole?

Thanks for any feedback

-- BrianH

[Brian Coca]

when executes inside the loop so it cannot prevent undefined errors,
the following does a union of the lists but makes sure to default each
to an empty list in case they are undefined:

with_items:"{{nginx_domain|default([])|union(nginx_port|default([]))}}"




--
Brian Coca

[Brian Huddleston]

Thanks for the feedback, it took a bit for me to understand.  I think I might be better off declare them individually in my example since that is much easier for other to read and add to and I can see possible text errors with all the brackets and parens that have to be used for each additional item. (say I wanted to add 3 more variables to check)