If you’ve got some experience with programming languages, you might find Ansible’s constructs a bit clunky. But no worries, let’s break them

If you’ve got some experience with programming languages, you might find Ansible’s constructs a bit clunky. But no worries, let’s break them down with some practical examples to make things clearer.

Conditionals (if, then, else)

In Ansible, the if-then-else construct is simplified to a single word: when.

Unlike traditional languages, there’s no direct else or elif. You’ll handle them all with separate when statements and the right expressions.

If you’ve got a bunch of conditions that all need to be true at the same time (logical AND), you can list them out:

Each variable in Ansible can be one of the following types:

• List
• Dictionary
• Boolean (True/true/yes/on or False/false/no/off)
• Integer
• Float
• String (if it’s wrapped in quotes or doesn’t fit the above types)

Ansible heavily relies on Jinja , which adds a bit more complexity to the mix. Any variable created using Jinja is treated as a string, and you’ll often need to convert it before use. But sometimes Ansible takes care of this for you, like when it automatically converts a string containing JSON into a list or dictionary when used in a loop.

Here’s a quick breakdown to help you navigate this:

• Variables can be either defined or undefined.
• A defined variable might be empty (None) or have some data.
• The variable’s type depends on the data it holds (Ansible uses weak typing).
• Ansible often creates strings using Jinja, which may require conversion.
• Ansible will automatically convert strings into lists or dictionaries when needed.
• Before performing mathematical operations, it’s a good habit to explicitly convert variables using Jinja filters like | int or | float.

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