Ansible troubleshooting — Error 304: inline-env-var

How to Solve the Ansible Error 304 inline-env-var

Introduction

Ansible, the powerful automation tool, empowers users to streamline tasks and processes efficiently. However, ensuring best practices and maintaining a clean and predictable playbook is crucial. Ansible-Lint, a popular linting tool for Ansible playbooks, enforces a range of rules to help users optimize their automation scripts. In this article, we focus on Rule 304, “inline-env-var,” which checks that environment variables should not be set within the ansible.builtin.command module. Instead, the ansible.builtin.shell module or the environment keyword should be used for this purpose.

Understanding Rule 304

Rule 304, “inline-env-var,” offers a simple yet effective piece of guidance for Ansible playbook authors. It highlights the importance of maintaining clarity and best practices in your playbooks by ensuring that environment variables are not set directly within the ansible.builtin.command module.

Problematic Code

Consider this problematic code snippet:

---
- name: Example playbook
  hosts: all
  tasks:
    - name: Set environment variable
      ansible.builtin.command…