I'm still new to Ansible, but my understanding is that it overwrites
variables by default, including dictionary variables. This is because the
default value for hash_behavior setting is "replace". If you change that
config value to "merge", you'll see the behavior you're expecting, I
believe.
I don't fully understand why replace is preferred, but I've found it easier
to just avoid dictionary variables just to keep things simple. Seems like
some changes have been made in v2.0.
On Sunday, November 15, 2015 at 8:37:27 AM UTC-5, cmacrae wrote:
>
> Hey People,
>
> Having some trouble using YAML dictionaries.
> I'm refactoring my variable structure in a role a wrote a while ago.
>
> The variables used to all look like: sensu_api_host, but I wanted to move to
> using dictionaries, so when referencing them it wouldn't be:
> {{ sensu_api_host }}
> it'd be:
> {{ sensu['api']['host'] }}
>
> In doing so, I've restructured my roles' defaults/main.yml like so:
> sensu:
> api:
> host: "{{ groups['sensu_masters'][0] }}"
> port: 4567
> ssl: "false"
> user_name: admin
> password: secret
> uchiwa_path: ''
> timeout: 5000
> client_config: client.json.j2
> config_path: /opt/local/etc/sensu
> gem_state: present
> plugin_gem_state: present
> user_name: sensu
> group_name: sensu
> include_plugins: true
> include_dashboard: false
> master: false
>
> Though, I have a problem. Lookups for the above variables work fine... until
> I try to assign them values elsewhere, where it should take precedence.
>
> Some of the key values above are clobbered when they are defined elsewhere,
> such as host_vars/hostname.yml or group_vars/groupname.yml.
> It seems that if I want to define one of the nested keys' value elsewhere, it
> ruins the dictionary lookup for all other child keys who share that parent.
>
> For example, above you can see that sensu['include_dashboard'] is set to
> false.
> If I want to set this to `true` for a particular host, in
> host_vars/hostname.yml like so:
> ---
> sensu:
> include_dashboard: true
>
> This then clobbers the lookup for any other child keys belonging to the sensu
> dictionary.
> So, for example, lookups for sensu['group_name'] will fail with the
> following:fatal: [my.host.tld] => One or more undefined variables: 'dict
> object' has no attribute 'group_name'
> When trying to evaluate the following play:
> - name: Ensure the Sensu group is present
> group: name={{ sensu['group_name'] }}
> state=present
>
> I'm not sure what it is I'm doing wrong here - I'd really appreciate any help!
> For the record: I'm running Ansible 1.9.4
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Calum
>
>
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