How to use loop in Ansible playbook

Question

Hi Guys,

I want to install multiple software in the remote system. But I don't want to use package modules multiple times. Because it reduces the performance of the system. So how can I create a loop for this task?

Answer 1

Hi@akhtar,

Sometimes you want to repeat a task multiple times. In computer programming, this is called a loop. Common Ansible loops include changing ownership on several files and/or directories with the file module, creating multiple users with the user module, and repeating a polling step until a certain result is reached. Ansible offers two keywords for creating loops: loop and with_<lookup>. You can see the below example.

- hosts: all
  tasks:
    - package:
        name: "{{ item }}"
        state: present
      loop:
        - "httpd"
        - "python"