How to run ansible task based on the Vagrant provider - ruby

Question

I have a vagrant job to create new VMs. Depending on the provider I pass to it, this could be created locally on Virtualbox, or on a Vsphere cluster with the vagrant-vsphere plugin.
Because of this, there are times when I want to run certain tasks on Virtualbox, and certain tasks on Vsphere. I figured the easiest way to do so would be to just pass a variable from Vagrant to ansible based on the provider. Roughly, this is what I have in my Vagrantfile so far.
$ansible_provider = ''
Vagrant.configure(VAGRANTFILE_API_VERSION) do |config|
config.vm.define vmconf[:name] do |vagrantconf|
vagrantconf.vm.provider :virtualbox do |vb|
$ansible_provider = "virtualbox"
end
vagrantconf.vm.provider :vsphere do |vb|
$ansible_provider = "vsphere"
end
end
config.vm.provision :ansible do |ansible|
ansible.playbook = "provision.yml"
ansible.extra_vars = { ansible_ssh_user: 'test',
ansible_provider: $ansible_provider }
end
end
I added a print statement that shows the two extra_vars and ansible_ssh_user works correctly, but ansible_provider is just blank. When I remove the first line and change it to a local variable, I get the following error:
Message: undefined local variable or method 'ansible_provider'
I haven't used ruby all that much, so I figured I'm doing something wrong there. Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

For this specific case, I think there is an easier way of achieving what you want. Ansible creates a series of facts for each host it runs against, which includes collecting virtualisation information for guests.Try adding the following task in one of your playbooks to see what I mean:
- name: Display Virtualisation Type fact
debug:
var: ansible_virtualization_type
That should mean you don't need to pass the variable in from Vagrant. If you want to see all the facts, in the directory containing your Vagrantfile, just run (you can add '-l host' to limit to one of your VM's):
ansible -m setup all
To answer your specific question, I think this will work for you:
# In this case I don't believe you need the '$' prefix for your variables
ansible_provider = ''
Vagrant.configure(VAGRANTFILE_API_VERSION) do |config|
config.vm.define vmconf[:name] do |vagrantconf|
vagrantconf.vm.provider :virtualbox do |vb|
ansible_provider = "virtualbox"
end
vagrantconf.vm.provider :vsphere do |vb|
ansible_provider = "vsphere"
end
end
config.vm.provision :ansible do |ansible|
ansible.playbook = "provision.yml"
ansible.extra_vars = { ansible_ssh_user: "test",
ansible_provider: "#{ansible_provider}" }
end
end