How to use a Variable in Ansible aws_ec2 plugin

Question

I want to filter ec2 instances according to the Environment tag which I define when I run the scripts, i.e ansible-playbook start.yml -e env=dev

However, it seems that the plugin is not parsing variables. Any idea on how to achieve this task?

my aws_ec2.yml:

---
  plugin: aws_ec2
  regions:
    - eu-central-1
  filters:
          tag:Secure: 'yes'
          tag:Environment: "{{ env }}"

  hostnames:
    - private-ip-address
  
  strict: False
  groups:
  keyed_groups:
          - key: tags.Function
            separator: ''

Edit

There is no error message resulting when running the playbook. The only problem that ansible handle the variable exactly as a string tag:Environment: "{{ env }}"instead of value tag:Environment: dev

Answer 1

This post is already a few years old but since this still seems to be an issue I want to share our workaround for this:

Before starting the actual pipeline, we generate the inventory plugin file from a template with Ansible itself. After this the inventory will be created by running ansible-inventory -i aws_ec2.yml .. etc.

With this approach we don't have to create a new inventory plugin file for each combination and reuse vars for the actual playbooks.

Maybe somebody finds this helpful in the future.