Looping on a dictionary with Ansible

November 21, 2022

I’m trying to create a loop that pulls data from a dictionary using Ansible and create resources (e.g. Group), based on https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/2.9/plugins/lookup/dict.html

# main.yaml
- name: 'Linux | Adding groups'
  ansible.builtin.group:
    name: "{{ item.key }}"
    state: "{{ item.value.state }}"
    gid: "{{ item.value.gid }}"
    system: False
  loop: "{{ lookup('dict', groups) }}"

# vars.yaml
groups:
  my_group:
    state: present
    gid: 1004

The code above always returns the following error:

fatal: [master-1]: FAILED! => {"msg": "The task includes an option with an undefined variable. The error was: 'list object' has no attribute 'state'\n\nThe error appears to be in 'path': line 3, column 3, but may\nbe elsewhere in the file depending on the exact syntax problem.\n\nThe offending line appears to be:\n\n\n- name: 'Linux | Adding groups'\n  ^ here\n"}

Any clue on what’s wrong?

Version: ansible [core 2.13.6]

>Solution :

You are looking for the dict2items filter.
You also have the issue that your variable is using a reserved word groups.

So, if you rename your variable, for example, to linux_groups, your task becomes:

- name: 'Linux | Adding groups'
  ansible.builtin.group:
    name: "{{ item.key }}"
    state: "{{ item.value.state }}"
    gid: "{{ item.value.gid }}"
    system: False
  loop: "{{ linux_groups | dict2items }}"