right now I am using a shell script in ansible that would be much more readable if it was on multiple lines
- name: iterate user groups shell: groupmod -o -g {{ item['guid'] }} {{ item['username'] }} ....more stuff to do with_items: "{{ users }}" Just not sure how to allow multiline script in Ansible shell module
Ansible uses YAML syntax in its playbooks. YAML has a number of block operators:
The > is a folding block operator. That is, it joins multiple lines together by spaces. The following syntax:
key: > This text has multiple lines Would assign the value This text has multiple lines\n to key.
The | character is a literal block operator. This is probably what you want for multi-line shell scripts. The following syntax:
key: | This text has multiple lines Would assign the value This text\nhas multiple\nlines\n to key.
You can use this for multiline shell scripts like this:
- name: iterate user groups shell: | groupmod -o -g {{ item['guid'] }} {{ item['username'] }} do_some_stuff_here and_some_other_stuff with_items: "{{ users }}" (Update in 2024: the following is no longer true; Ansible is now less janky.)
There is one caveat: Ansible does some janky manipulation of arguments to the shell command, so while the above will generally work as expected, the following won't:
- shell: | cat <<EOF This is a test. EOF Ansible will actually render that text with leading spaces, which means the shell will never find the string EOF at the beginning of a line. You can avoid Ansible's unhelpful heuristics by using the cmd parameter like this:
- shell: cmd: | cat <<EOF This is a test. EOF @JKLaiho points out in a comment that the behavior of > is perhaps unexpected if you include additional indentation in your string. If you write:
key: > this is a test You will get the value:
"this\n is\n a\n test\n" 
ansible instead of ansiable-playbook?
shell: > actually results in ansible inserting line breaks, so this is incorrect.
shell: >, and furthermore your statement is simply incorrect: Ansible doesn't know whether you use " or > or |; it only knows what text it receives after parsing the YAML. The > quote operating is a folding operator and does not preserve newlines. If you're seeing different behavior, feel free to open a question and I would be happy to take a look at it.
>: they all must be indented the same amount for the folding to work correctly (at least in Ansible). I posted a complementary answer about this. This might be what @PhilippLudwig was seeing?Tried with ansible 2.0.0.2:
--- - hosts: all tasks: - name: multiline shell command shell: > ls --color /home register: stdout - name: debug output debug: msg={{ stdout }} The shell command is collapsed into a single line, as in ls --color /home
Reference (visited in 2021): https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/reference_appendices/YAMLSyntax.html ==> search form "multiple lines" in the page.
> has a very specific meaning. I tried this and it did not work as expected.
Adding a space before the EOF delimiter allows to avoid cmd:
- shell: | cat <<' EOF' This is a test. EOF I prefer this syntax as it allows to set configuration parameters for the shell:
--- - name: an example shell: cmd: | docker build -t current_dir . echo "Hello World" date chdir: /home/vagrant/ A quick caveat about the folding > operator that had me scratching my head for a while: the rows indented beneath it have to be at the same indentation level for the folding to happen correctly, at least when using Ansible.
I was converting an existing multi-line shell command that had \ line endings to escape newlines and had indented every row below the first one two spaces more. I used shell: >, removed the backslashes and preserved the existing indentation.
The newlines were preserved, and I was losing my mind, because everywhere it said that > should convert them to spaces.
See below for an example:
# Converts into ls -la /tmp, as expected - name: working shell command that folds newlines shell: > ls -la /tmp # Tries to run -la and /tmp as their own commands - name: failing shell command that does not fold newlines shell: > ls -la /tmp Hope this helps someone in a similar situation!
You can use lineinfile collection to append the file, attribute create to create file if not exist and multi line string using "|".
- name: Add a line to a file if the file does not exist ansible.builtin.lineinfile: path: ~/.ssh/config line: | Host {{item.COMPONENT}} {{item.COMPONENT}}.{{ZONE}} HostName {{r53_var_one.resource_record_sets[0].resource_records[0].value}} User centos Port 22 IdentityFile ~/.ssh/key.pem StrictHostKeyChecking no create: yes mode: '0600' To know how to multilines works in ansbile, you may want to test this playbook to actually know what pipe (LF->LF) and Greather than (LF->space) are about.
- hosts: all,localhost tasks: - name: greather_than debug: msg: > a b c - name: pipe debug: msg: | a b c This is tested this way.
# ansible-playbook test.yml [WARNING]: provided hosts list is empty, only localhost is available. Note that the implicit localhost does not match 'all' PLAY [all,localhost] *************************************************************************** TASK [Gathering Facts] ************************************************************************* ok: [localhost] TASK [greater_than] **************************************************************************** ok: [localhost] => { "msg": "a b c\n" } TASK [pipe] *********************************************************************************** ok: [localhost] => { "msg": "a \nb\nc\n" } PLAY RECAP *********************************************************************************** localhost : ok=3 changed=0 unreachable=0 failed=0 skipped=0 rescued=0 ignored=0 # 