extra-vars behavior

[Arthur Reyes]

I didn't see it listed in Issues, so I thought I would ask here if a recent discovery was actually a bug.

I'm working on some shell wrappers for the ansible-playbook and wanted to maintain a certain level of pedantry. It appears that ansible-playbook will except multiple --extra-vars options and append them to a single argv, which is what I expect from Python. 

In other words, this:

ansible-playbook site.yml --extra-vars "hosts='*CUS03*'" --extra-vars "foo=''" --extra-vars "bar='Yes'"

Is the same as this:

ansible-playbook site.yml --extra-vars "hosts='*CUS03*' foo='' bar='Yes'"

This is a good thing for me, but before I continue working on a wrapper that relies on this behavior, I figured I should ask around to see if this is actually an Issue.

Thank you,

Arthur

[Joanna Delaporte]

I've used multiple vars similar to your second example for quite a while, and it's documented to be used like that, so I believe it is a feature, not a bug. I'm not sure I have ever used quotes inside the extra vars list, but I would guess you can use singles inside the doubles.

The following is how I have frequently used extra-vars:

ansible-playbook playbook.yml --extra-vars "hosts=hosts-group user=ansible-user var2=27" 

Joanna

[Arthur Reyes]

I started reading the code and I agree it is a feature. I would recommend looking at this file to see how the playbook treats each option. Very informative:

ansible/lib/ansible/cli/__init__.py

        if runtask_opts:

            parser.add_option('-e', '--extra-vars', dest="extra_vars", action="append",

                help="set additional variables as key=value or YAML/JSON", default=[])