Unexpected Exception: name 'basestring' is not defined when invoking ansible2

Question

I'm trying to execute ansible2 commnads...

When I do:

ansible-playbook -vvv -i my/inventory my/playbook.yml

I get:

Unexpected Exception: name 'basestring' is not defined the full traceback was:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/bin/ansible-playbook", line 85, in <module>
    sys.exit(cli.run())
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.4/site-packages/ansible/cli/playbook.py", line 150, in run
    results = pbex.run()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.4/site-packages/ansible/executor/playbook_executor.py", line 87, in run
    self._tqm.load_callbacks()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.4/site-packages/ansible/executor/task_queue_manager.py", line 149, in load_callbacks
    elif isinstance(self._stdout_callback, basestring):
NameError: name 'basestring' is not defined

Here is ansible --version:

ansible 2.0.0.2
  config file = /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg
  configured module search path = Default w/o overrides

And here is python --version

Python 3.4.3

Answer 1

Ansible below version 2.5 requires Python 2.6 or 2.7 on the control host: Control Node Requirements

basestring is no longer available in Python 3. From What’s New In Python 3.0:

The builtin basestring abstract type was removed. Use str instead. The str and bytes types don’t have functionality enough in common to warrant a shared base class. The 2to3 tool (see below) replaces every occurrence of basestring with str.

Answer 2

basestring is not available in Python 3.:

This can be fixed for python 2.x and 3.x with the following:

try:
  basestring
except NameError:
  basestring = str

Answer 3

I ran into this issue using Python 3 with Ansible and solved by forking the dopy project and installing dopy in my ansible script with:

name: git+https://github.com/eodgooch/dopy@0.4.0#egg=dopy.

If you are still getting errors be sure to change the version to 0.4.0 and remove any lingering dopy packages from your Python site-packages directory.

Also you could pip3 install git+https://github.com/eodgooch/dopy@0.4.0#egg=dopy instead of in your Ansible Task.

Answer 4

Replace basestring with str. In 2.x basestring is there. but in 3.x the basestring has been replaced with "str".

Answer 5

The problem might be due to python version. In 2.x, basestring is there but in 3.x it has been replaced with "str".