right now I am using a shell script in ansible that would be much more readable if it was on multiple lines
- name: iterate user groups
shell: groupmod -o -g {{ item['guid'] }} {{ item['username'] }} ....more stuff to do
with_items: "{{ users }}"
Just not sure how to allow multiline script in Ansible shell module
Ansible uses YAML syntax in its playbooks. YAML has a number of block operators:
The >
is a folding block operator. That is, it joins multiple lines together by spaces. The following syntax:
key: >
This text
has multiple
lines
Would assign the value This text has multiple lines\n
to key
.
The |
character is a literal block operator. This is probably what you want for multi-line shell scripts. The following syntax:
key: |
This text
has multiple
lines
Would assign the value This text\nhas multiple\nlines\n
to key
.
You can use this for multiline shell scripts like this:
- name: iterate user groups
shell: |
groupmod -o -g {{ item['guid'] }} {{ item['username'] }}
do_some_stuff_here
and_some_other_stuff
with_items: "{{ users }}"
There is one caveat: Ansible does some janky manipulation of arguments to the shell
command, so while the above will generally work as expected, the following won't:
- shell: |
cat <<EOF
This is a test.
EOF
Ansible will actually render that text with leading spaces, which means the shell will never find the string EOF
at the beginning of a line. You can avoid Ansible's unhelpful heuristics by using the cmd
parameter like this:
- shell:
cmd: |
cat <<EOF
This is a test.
EOF