VariablesΒΆ

There are times when we have a bunch of similar servers but they are not exactly the same. For example, consider webservers. They may all run Nginx and might have same set of users accounts and ACLs but they may vary slightly in configuration. For such scenarios, variables are very helpful. A variable name can only consist of letters, numbers, and underscores and should always start with a letter. Below is an example of a variable definition in a playbook.

- hosts: webservers
  vars:
    http_port: 80

We can save the result of a command to a variable and use that somewhere else in the playbook, e.g. in conditionals.

tasks:

    - name: list contents of directory
      command: ls mydir
      register: contents

    - name: check contents for emptiness
      debug: msg="Directory is empty"
      when: contents.stdout == ""