How do I work with Ansible list of dicts? - ansible

Question

I'm so confused with this. If I have a file containing:
users:
- name: jconnor
first: john
last: connor
uid: 3003
- name: sconnor
first: sarah
last: connor
uid: 3001
How do I get the details of each user? With this simple playbook:
- name: create users
hosts: localhost
gather_facts: false
tasks:
- name: Include vars
include_vars:
file: user_list.yml
name: users
- name: debug
debug:
msg: "{{ item }}"
with_dict: "{{ users }}"
I get the following which I can't use:
ok: [localhost] => (item={'value': [{u'last': u'connor', u'uid': 3003, u'name': u'jconnor', u'first': u'john'}, {u'last': u'connor', u'uid': 3001, u'name': u'sconnor', u'first': u'sarah'}], 'key': u'users'}) => {
"msg": {
"key": "users",
"value": [
{
"first": "john",
"last": "connor",
"name": "jconnor",
"uid": 3003
},
{
"first": "sarah",
"last": "connor",
"name": "sconnor",
"uid": 3001
}
]
}
}
I want to create user accounts with this but I simply don't understand how to use this structure.
Note that this is part of a larger structure and I can't change it.
Thanks

Answer 1

Since the users variable is a list of dicts, you should loop with loop or with_items. Then we can access the key of each dict with item.key. E.g.: item.name, item.uid, etc.
Note that you are importing the variables from the file with the name users. So this variable now contains the users hash of that file. If you skip name: users in include_var, then you can directly access the users dict while looping.
tasks:
- include_vars:
file: user_list.yml
name: users
- debug:
msg: "Username is {{ item.name }}, full name is {{ item.first }} {{ item.last }}, userid is {{ item.uid }}"
with_items: "{{ users.users }}"
This outputs message (showing 1 item):
ok: [localhost] => (item={u'last': u'connor', u'uid': 3003, u'name': u'jconnor', u'first': u'john'}) => {
"msg": "Username is jconnor, full name is john connor, userid is 3003"
}