ansible - variable within variable

Question

Ansible 1.9.2 version.

Does Ansible supports variable expansion within a variable while evaluating it.

I have a task to download 3 zip files from Artifactory

Answer 1

No it doesn't. But it doesn't mean that you have to expand it into 3 different tasks. What you can do is actually expand you "dictionary" to look similar to this:

with_items:
 - {"url": "https://xxxxx", "file": "/tmp/xxxxx" }
 - {"url": "https://yyyyy", "file": "/tmp/yyyyy" }
 - {"url": "https://zzzzz", "file": "/tmp/zzzzz" }

Then in your task just call different parameters: {{ item.url }} and {{ item.file }}

Alternative Options:

1. Write your own filter that will expand your variable according to the value {{ jmeterplugins_url | my_custom_filter(item.plugin) }}

2. Write a custom module, that will encapsulate all of the functionality of fetching url into the file based on your inputs

3. Write custom lookup_plugin that will iterate through your list of variables and produce correct result.

4. Since you are using command module you can leverage bash to concatenate your url, file in the same command ( this would probably be the messiest solution )