I am currently working through replacing a legacy orchestration tool with
Ansible while maintaining the existing orchestration scripts in place. I
have hit an interesting problem with environment variables that I haven't
yet been able to solve. Essentially, I want to be able to access
environment variables that are created as part of a shell/comand task.
Ideally I would like to extract these variables from the shell task and
populate facts with the values and/or pass the values to subsequent tasks.
The issue is that I can only access the environment variables in that task
(ie. subsequent tasks can't 'see' them) so I need some way of
exporting/importing them for other tasks.
The problem is displayed in the following playbook:
---
- hosts: all
tasks:
- name: Export environment variable
shell: export ANIMAL=dropbear
- debug: msg="{{ ansible_env.ANIMAL }}"
Unless 'ANIMAL' already exists in the environment (ie. outside of the first
shell task), the debug message won't be able to access the value of ANIMAL.
I have investigated several different methods such as:
1. Registering the shell command and printing 'env' to stdout and parsing
2. Dumping to file on filesystem and using wrapper to load/source file from
disk in subsequent tasks
3. Parsing a file dumped to disk with include_vars / lookup with ini plugin
All methods seem a little too 'hacky' and I was wondering if anyone had a
more elegant solution that didn't involve storing the information on disk?
I was hoping there was a variable exposed when registering the shell task
so you can access environment variables eg.
'registered_var.env_vars.ANIMAL', similar to how you access stdout/stderr
etc. Is there something this obvious that I am missing?
It appears there has been similar discussion about environment variables
set in Ansible shell tasks not persisting across tasks here, but it looks
to end up with a similar conclusion:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27733511/how-to-set-linux-environment-variables-with-ansible
All suggestions for making this process more streamlined will be much
appreciated! (passing values through etcd at the moment).
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