How to enforce the order of with_dict in Ansible?

Question

I have dictionary-type of data that I want to iterate through and keeping the order is important:

with_dict_test:
  one:   1
  two:   2
  three: 3
  four:  4
  five:  5
  six:   6

Now when I write a task to print the keys and values, they are printed in seemingly random order (6, 3, 1, 4, 5, 2).

---
- name: with_dict test
  debug: msg="{{item.key}} --> {{item.value}}"
  with_dict: with_dict_test

How can I enforce Ansible to iterate in the given order? Or is there anything better suited than with_dict? I really need both the key and the value during task execution...

Answer 1

I don't see an easy way to use dicts as they determine there order from the order of its hashed keys.
You can do the following:

with_dict_test:
  - { key: 'one', value: 1 }
  - { key: 'two', value: 2 }
  - { key: 'three', value: 3 }
  - { key: 'four', value: 4 }
  - { key: 'five', value: 5 }
  - { key: 'six', value: 6 }

and in the playbook just replace with_dict with with_items:

---
- name: with_dict test
  debug: msg="{{item.key}} --> {{item.value}}"
  with_items: with_dict_test

If you find this solution (the declaration of the variable) to ugly, you can do this:

key: ['one', 'two', 'three', 'four', 'five', 'six']
values: [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

and in the playbook

---
- name: with_dict test
  debug: msg="{{item.0}} --> {{item.1}}"
  with_together:
    - key
    - value