In ansible search test is there a way to test more than one value using a boolean OR operator?

Question

I am working on an ansible playbook task in ansible version 2.9 and I have a loop paired with a when conditional and I'd like to have the conditional test for two values rather than just one (which works for me). Is there a way to perform a boolean OR using a search() test in the when statement?

Here is what I have used that works (just testing one value):

- name: Test Interface Looping
  hosts: test
  vars:
    desc_search: "test"
    desc_search_c: "TEST"
  tasks:
    - name: IOS Facts
      ios_facts:
        gather_subset:
          - '!all'
          - '!min'
        gather_network_resources:
          - 'interfaces'
      register: result
    - debug: var=result
    - name: Update all descriptions
      ios_interfaces:
        config:
          - name: "{{ item.key }}"
            description: "Test Done"
        state: replaced
      loop: "{{ ansible_net_interfaces|dict2items }}"
      when: item.value.description is search(desc_search)

Here is what I would like to do if possible (so far not working):

- name: Test Interface Looping
  hosts: test
  vars:
    desc_search: "test"
    desc_search_c: "TEST"
  tasks:
    - name: IOS Facts
      ios_facts:
        gather_subset:
          - '!all'
          - '!min'
        gather_network_resources:
          - 'interfaces'
      register: result
    - debug: var=result
    - name: Update all descriptions
      ios_interfaces:
        config:
          - name: "{{ item.key }}"
            description: "Test Done"
        state: replaced
      loop: "{{ ansible_net_interfaces|dict2items }}"
      when: item.value.description is search(desc_search) or search(desc_search_c)

I have tried adding the | bool at the end of the when statement as well but in both cases I get the error: The conditional check 'item.value.description is search(desc_search) or search(desc_search_c)' failed. The error was: error while evaluating conditional (item.value.description is search(desc_search) or search(desc_search_c)): 'search' is undefined...

Is it possible to do what I'm trying to do here? Apologies for any incorrect terminology I may have used. I am a network engineer so not formally educated in ansible or programming/scripting.

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 22 '21 at 18:45

There are 3 answers to your question, starting with the error you are receiving: search is not a jinja2 "filter" it's a "test", meaning it must be used with the is or is not keywords (as you correctly did in the first half of the when):

      when: item.value.description is search(desc_search) or item.value.description is search(desc_search_c)

the second answer is that since what you care about appears to be a case insensitive search, you can specify that via the (?i) regex modifier, or the ignorecase=True kwarg

      when: item.value.description is search(desc_search, ignorecase=True)

and as an alternate to that, if you really only want test and TEST (meaning my presumption about ignorecase was wrong), and you do care about the case, but just want those two strings, you can use the | regex alternation character:

      when: item.value.description is search(desc_search+"|"+desc_search_c)

It's like many things in programming, there are a lot of ways to accomplish that goal, and you should pick the one that's easiest for you and your team to reason about when you look at this code next month :-)

Thanks! I think that will work for what I need here. Appreciate the detailed and very informative response! — Devin Kennedy, Apr 22 '21 at 19:11
If you find that it does, please consider marking the answer as accepted to let others know it solved your problem. Good luck! — mdaniel, Apr 22 '21 at 19:44

In ansible search test is there a way to test more than one value using a boolean OR operator?

1 Answers1