adding roles at run time and include_role

[Spike]

Hi there,

first post here so just a quick thank you to everybody who has contributed to ansible, it'a fantastic piece of software.

I'm trying to specify hosts and roles at run time from cli while using a template playbook like this:

# ideal playbook

---

- hosts: "{{var_hosts}}"

  roles:

    - { role: {{item}} }

  with_items: "{{var_roles}}"

# cli call

ansible-playbook play.yml -e "var_hosts=host, var_roles=[role1, role2]"

This however did not work for me, it just seems it's not possible to use with_items on "roles".

Since I'm on 2.2 I thought I may use include_role, so I tried this:

---

- hosts: "{{var_hosts}}"

  tasks:

  - name: include roles

    include_role:

      name: "{{item}}"

    with_items: {{var_roles}}

this however failed with ERROR! 'item' is undefined

I thought I might not be able to use vars there, but if I define a var such as "role" and use it instead of "item" it works:

- hosts: "{{var_hosts}}"

  vars:

    role: test

  tasks:

  - name: include roles

    include_role:

      name: "{{role}}"

am I doing something wrong? is there any way I can pass roles from cli and load them dynamically?

thanks,

Spike