Ansible Task Looping Directives

External

• https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/user_guide/playbooks_loops.html

Internal

• Ansible Concepts

Loops

with_items

An iterator whose elements can be accessed with item.<element>. The content to iterate over may came from in-line declaration or from a variable.

In-line declaration:

Variable:

loop

Takes a list for the task to iterate over, saving each list element into the item variable (configurable via loop_control)

jdks:
  - corretto8
  - corretto11
...
- name: Multiple items in a loop
  homebrew_cask:
    name: "{{ item }}"
    state: present
  loop: "{{ jdks }}"

An existing variable's field that reference a list can be used:

- name: Debug
  debug:
    var: item.path
    loop: "{{ some_task_result.files }}"

with_<lookup_plugin>

The same as loop but adds the output of any lookup plugin to generate the item list.