Ansible Using --extra-vars for conditional includes

Question

I am using Ansible to deploy an environment that may have services distributed or not. I would like to conditionally include playbooks based on arguments I pass to ansible-playbook.

create_server.yml

---
- include: launch_ec2_instance.yml

- include install_postgres.yml
  when {{db}} == "Y"

- include install_redis.yml
  when {{redis}} == "Y"

Here is how I am calling create_server.yml

ansible-playbook create_server.yml -i local --extra-vars "db=Y redis=N"

Is it possible to do this and if so, how?

Answer 1

Yes. It's possible. You are missing a colon(:) on your when statement.

---
- include: launch_ec2_instance.yml

- include install_postgres.yml
  when: {{ db }} == "Y"

- include install_redis.yml
  when: {{ redis }} == "Y"

You can also omit the braces ({{ }}):

---
- include: launch_ec2_instance.yml

- include install_postgres.yml
  when: db == "Y"

- include install_redis.yml
  when: redis == "Y"