How do I define variables for the current user in Ansible? - ansible

Question

We are using vagrant and ansible to create standard development environments.
The ansible playbooks, vagrant files, etc. are in a git repository.
I've using variable file separation to refer to variable files in the developer's home directory for some senstitive and/or user-specific information (e.g. email address).
We use the variables by doing a vars_file: as part of the playbook, but have to do it for every play.
I don't want to put it in the group_vars/all file because it would then be in the repository and not specific to the user.
I would rather not have a file in the repository that is ignored because people still manage to include it and it screw everybody else up.
Is there a way of doing an equivalent of groups/all which can contain tasks and/or variable definitions that will automatically run whenever a playbook is run?

Answer 1

We use the variables by doing a vars_file: as part of the playbook, but have to do it for every play.
Nope, you can do it on playbook level. (But this might be a new thing, could have been impossible back then, I did not check.)
Is there a way of doing an equivalent of groups/all which can contain tasks and/or variable definitions that will automatically run whenever a playbook is run?
Automatically run/included when?! I don't think this is possible as there would be a lot of open questions like:
Should this be specified on the target machine or the ansible server?
How do you specify for which user should this happen on which host?
If there are tasks: do you want this to be executed on each playbook
when it is run using the given user? What about tasks which specifies
that they run as root (become)? What about tasks that specify a
given user to be executed as? What about tasks that are run as root
but creates a file with the owner matching the given user?
As there are no user scopes with variables and we don't really have a "user context" outlined (see the last questions) we are currently stuck with inclusion of variable files explicitly. Hence the below options:
You can keep using vars_file and specify a first found list.
vars_file:
- - ~/ansible_config/vars.yml
- <default vars file somewhere on the machine>
This way the ansible executor user can redefine values...
You can use the --extra-vars #<filepath> syntax to include all variables from a file, and you can have more than one of these.
A similar thing I do is that I include every variable from every yml file within my GLOBAL_INPUT_DIR (which is an environment variable that can be defined before running the bash script executing ansible-playbook or in a your bash profile or something).
EXTRA_ARGS=`{
{
find "${GLOBAL_INPUT_DIR}" -iname "*.yml";
}\
| while read line; do echo "--extra-vars #${line} "; done \
| tr -d "\n"
}`
ansible-playbook $# ${EXTRA_ARGS}
I usually include something like this in my doings to provide an easy way of redifining variables...
BUT: be aware that this will redefine ALL occurances of a variable name within the playbook (but this was also true with vars_file).