How to use ansible to assign multiple existing users to a new group

Question

I created a new group in OS. Now I want to assign 5 or more existing users to that group using ansible. I believe I could do this for single user.

---
- name: add user to a group
  become: 'yes'
  become_method: sudo
  hosts: all

  tasks:

  - user:
        name: myusername
        groups: new_group
        append: yes
...

I want to assign all users to that group in one go instead of running the script several time with different username each time.

Answer 1

It sounds like you would like to explore with_items.

From the top of my head, it should look like this:

- user:
    name: "{{ item }}"
    groups: my_group
    append: yes
  with_items:
    - johnsmith
    - beckyjones
    - foobar

You can, of course create a separate list of users in a variable, and call with_items: "{{ userlist }}".

Note the indentation: with_items is in the same indentation level as the module name you call.