In Ansible, how to combine variables from separate files into one array?

Question

In Ansible, in a role, I have vars files like this:

vars/
    app1.yml
    app2.yml

Each file contains vars specific to an app/website like

Answer 1

Well, you cannot directly build an array, but you can achieve the same effort with a dict.

Suppose you want to construct an array:

[{
    name: 'bob',
    age: 30
}, {
    name: 'alice',
    age: 35 
}]

You can put each element in a file like:

bob.yml

bob:
  name: bob
  age: 30

alice.yml

alice:
  name: alice
  age: 35

Place these files in the same dir (e.g. user), then use include_vars to load the whole dir:

- name: Include vars
  include_vars:
    name: users
    dir: user

This will give you a dict users:

users:
  alice:
    name: alice
    age: 35
  bob:
    name: bob
    age: 30

User the dict2items filter in ansible, you get the array you want