1. Vars

1.1. Definition

Can be defined from:

• Playbooks

• Files

• Inventories (group vars, host vars)

• Command line

• Discovered variables (facts)

• Ansible Tower

# The variables file used by the playbooks in the dbservers group.
# These don't have to be explicitly imported by vars_files: they are autopopulated.

mysqlservice: mysqld
mysql_port: 3306
dbuser: foouser
dbname: foodb
upassword: abc

1.2. Environment Variables

- hosts: all
  remote_user: root

  # here we make a variable named "env" that is a dictionary
  vars:
    env:
       HI: test2
       http_proxy: http://proxy.example.com:8080

  tasks:

    # here we just define the dictionary directly and use it
    # (here $HI is the shell variable as nothing in Ansible will replace it)

    - shell: echo $HI
      environment:
         HI: test1

    # here we are using the "env" map variable above

    - shell: echo $HI
      environment: "{{ env }}"

1.3. Best Practices

• Use descriptive unique human-meaningful variable names

• Prefer flat variables over nested

  Code 1.41. Nested variables

  apache:
      startservers: 2
      maxclients: 2
  

  Code 1.42. Flat variables

  apache_startservers: 2
  apache_maxclients: 2