TIL 2018-11-20: String replacement in an Ansible Playbook

README.md

String replacement in an Ansible Playbook

Ansible is built with Python, and many things in there relate to the way Python works. String replacement, however, is slightly different. Trying to run the following playbook:

---
- tasks:
  - debug:
      msg: "{{ string.replace('something', 'some', 'any') }}"

will result in Ansible complaining about an undefined variable string being used.

Ansible Playbooks use the [Jinja2][jinja2] template engine, which provides a way to achieve this with a replace filter. Running the following playbook:

---
- tasks:
  - debug:
      msg: "{{ 'something' | replace('some', 'any') }}"

will successfully print out the debug message with anything.