Master Ansible Magic Variables: A Practical Playbook Guide

How to Use Ansible Magic Variables in Ansible Playbook

I'm going to show you a live Playbook and some simple Ansible code.

I'm Luca Berton and welcome to today's episode of Ansible Pilot.

Ansible Magic Variables

How to Ansible Magic Variables in Ansible Playbook.

The good news is that Ansible provides some internal variables that come out of the box with some information such as running the Ansible version, inventory details, or execution options.

Some examples:

• playbook_dir

The path to the directory of the playbook that was passed to the ansible-playbook command line

• inventory_dir

The directory of the inventory source in which the inventory_hostname was first defined

• inventory_file

The file name of the inventory source in which the inventory_hostname was first defined

• inventory_hostname

The inventory name for the 'current' host is being iterated over in the play

• ansible_check_mode / ansible_diff_mode

Boolean that indicates if we are in check/diff mode or not

• ansible_version

Dictionary/map that contains information about the currently running version of ansible, it has the following keys: full, major, minor, revision and string.

Links

The full list is available on the official Ansible website [Magic variables](https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/reference_appendices/special_variables.html)

## Playbook

How to use Ansible Magic Variables in Ansible Playbook?

Let's see in action some of the most common Ansible Magic Variables in an Ansible Playbook.

I'm going to display the current value of the following variables:

• ansible_config_file

The full path of the used Ansible configuration file

playbook_dir

The path to the directory of the playbook was passed to the ansible-playbook command line.

• inventory_dir

The directory of the inventory source in which the inventory_hostname was first defined

• inventory_file

The file name of the inventory source in which the inventory_hostname was first defined

• ansible_check_mode

Boolean that indicates if we are in check mode or not

• ansible_diff_mode

Boolean that indicates if we are in diff mode or not

• ansible_forks

Integer reflecting the number of maximum forks available to this run

• ansible_verbosity

Current verbosity setting for Ansible

• inventory_hostname

The inventory name for the 'current' host is being iterated over in the play

• ansible_play_hosts

List of hosts in the current play run, not limited by the serial. Failed/Unreachable hosts are excluded from this list.

• ansible_version

Dictionary/map that contains information about the currently running version of ansible, it has the following keys: full, major, minor, revision and string.

code

```yaml

---

• name: magic vars Playbook

hosts: all

gather_facts: false

tasks:

- name: magic variable

ansible.builtin.debug:

var: "{{ item }}"

loop:

- ansible_config_file

- playbook_dir

- inventory_dir