Ansible Blocks With Conditionals

Ansible Blocks With Conditionals

Background

Recently I had an interesting issue when using Ansible Blocks in a playbook which was skipping tasks within the block itself. I had no idea that this was to be expected so I am sharing this here in case others stumble upon this.

The playbook that I had created was importing another playbook using a loop (Because Ansible does not support loops of tasks any other way that I know of) a defined number of times. As part of the Block, I had a conditional which evaluated whether or not something was true or false. And based on this condition, additional tasks within the block were to be executed. Well I was definitely caught by surprise once I understood what was occurring. And actually, it is actually quite interesting to know.

Example

For the context of this example I will not be using a looping playbook, but instead a simplistic playbook to demonstrate what I saw.

Example 1

This example will demonstrate how I had originally put the playbook together and we can see the results.

Playbook:

---
- hosts: localhost
  gather_facts: false
  connection: local
  vars:
    debugging: true
  tasks:
    - block:
        - name: First Task
          debug:
            msg: First Task

        - name: Set debugging To False
          set_fact:
            debugging: false

        - name: Second Task
          debug:
            msg: Second Task

      when: debugging|bool

Based on the above playbook, I had expected both First Task and Second Task to execute. But what we will see is, that this is not true at all.

Execution:

PLAY [localhost] *********************************************************************************************************************************************

TASK [First Task] ********************************************************************************************************************************************
ok: [localhost] => {
    "msg": "First Task"
}

TASK [Set debugging To False] ********************************************************************************************************************************
ok: [localhost]

TASK [Second Task] *******************************************************************************************************************************************
skipping: [localhost]

PLAY RECAP ***************************************************************************************************************************************************
localhost                  : ok=2    changed=0    unreachable=0    failed=0    skipped=1    rescued=0    ignored=0

Now if you review the results from above, you notice that the Second Task was skipped. My initial thought was WTF, why did the Second Task not execute because when I entered the block, debugging was set to true. So, I would have assumed that even though I set debugging: false in the set_fact task, that it would have still executed that Second Task. Not at all true.

Example 2

For this example, I will simply switch the tasks around to show that it works. I know this is poor example because there really is not any reason that it SHOULDN’T work. But again, for a simplistic demonstration it serves just fine because our real concern is what we learned from Example 1.

Playbook:

---
- hosts: localhost
  gather_facts: false
  connection: local
  vars:
    debugging: true
  tasks:
    - block:
        - name: First Task
          debug:
            msg: First Task

        - name: Second Task
          debug:
            msg: Second Task

        - name: Set debugging To False
          set_fact:
            debugging: false

      when: debugging|bool

Execution:

PLAY [localhost] *********************************************************************************************************************************************

TASK [First Task] ********************************************************************************************************************************************
ok: [localhost] => {
    "msg": "First Task"
}

TASK [Second Task] *******************************************************************************************************************************************
ok: [localhost] => {
    "msg": "Second Task"
}

TASK [Set debugging To False] ********************************************************************************************************************************
ok: [localhost]

PLAY RECAP ***************************************************************************************************************************************************
localhost                  : ok=3    changed=0    unreachable=0    failed=0    skipped=0    rescued=0    ignored=0

As you can see, this worked as expected. Again, the real focus is on the Example 1 results.

Learnings

Based on what I saw in my real use case in addition to these examples is the following:

• If you are using a conditional as part of your block, ensure that you do not set the variable which defines whether the condition is met or not prior to any additional tasks within the block. ALWAYS set the condition as the last task inside the block.
• Ansible actually evaluates the conditional which is defined as part of the block for each and every task inside the block itself.

Updated Example

I wanted to share this with others after I had someone reach out and ask about using blocks and conditionals with roles. I felt this was a great question and wanted to share the playbook we came up with.

Conclusion

Hope this is of some use to others in case you ever run into this unexpected scenario.

And as always, ENJOY!!