Passing Variables to Ansible Playbook: A Quick Guide

How to pass or override an Ansible Playbook variable from the command line in plaintext, JSON, or YAML. It is very useful to combine some script, automation, or shell variables. For example, the fruit variable is defined as “banana” and changed to “apple” or “raspberry”.

Introduction

In today’s episode of Ansible Pilot, we’ll delve into the practical aspect of passing variables to Ansible Playbooks via the command line. This can be a powerful and flexible way to customize your playbook execution based on dynamic inputs. I’m Luca Berton, and let’s jump right into the world of Ansible extra variables.

Understanding Ansible Extra Variables

Ansible extra variables provide a means to pass values to your playbook from the command line. This flexibility is particularly valuable when you need to integrate Ansible into existing automation scripts or workflows. Extra variables can be specified in various formats, and today, we’ll explore a few options.