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Mastering Ansible, 4th Edition

You're reading from   Mastering Ansible, 4th Edition Automate configuration management and overcome deployment challenges with Ansible

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Product type Paperback
Published in Dec 2021
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781801818780
Length 540 pages
Edition 4th Edition
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Authors (2):
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Jesse Keating Jesse Keating
Author Profile Icon Jesse Keating
Jesse Keating
James Freeman James Freeman
Author Profile Icon James Freeman
James Freeman
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Table of Contents (18) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Section 1: Ansible Overview and Fundamentals
2. Chapter 1: The System Architecture and Design of Ansible FREE CHAPTER 3. Chapter 2: Migrating from Earlier Ansible Versions 4. Chapter 3: Protecting Your Secrets with Ansible 5. Chapter 4: Ansible and Windows – Not Just for Linux 6. Chapter 5: Infrastructure Management for Enterprises with AWX 7. Section 2: Writing and Troubleshooting Ansible Playbooks
8. Chapter 6: Unlocking the Power of Jinja2 Templates 9. Chapter 7: Controlling Task Conditions 10. Chapter 8: Composing Reusable Ansible Content with Roles 11. Chapter 9: Troubleshooting Ansible 12. Chapter 10: Extending Ansible 13. Section 3: Orchestration with Ansible
14. Chapter 11: Minimizing Downtime with Rolling Deployments 15. Chapter 12: Infrastructure Provisioning 16. Chapter 13: Network Automation 17. Other Books You May Enjoy

Iterative tasks with loops

Loops deserve a special mention in this chapter. So far, we have focused on controlling the flow of a playbook in a top-to-bottom fashion—we have changed the various conditions that might be evaluated as the playbook runs, and we have also focused on creating concise, efficient code. What happens, however, if you have a single task, but need to run it against a list of data; for example, creating several user accounts, directories, or indeed something more complex?

Looping changed in Ansible 2.5—prior to this, loops were generally created with keywords such as with_items and you may still see this in legacy code. Although some backward compatibility remains, it is advisable to move to the newer loop keyword instead.

Let's take a simple example—we need to create two directories. Create loop.yaml as follows:

---
- name: looping demo
  hosts: localhost
  gather_facts: false...
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