ansible-play | Group statements in Ansible playbooks | DevOps library

It might be possible that Ansible is not parsing the updated inventory file file, or the hosts name is being malformed in as it updates the inventory.

In this scenario, you can use the -vv or -vvvv parameter in your Ansible command to get extra logging.

This will give you a complete picture into what Ansible is actually doing as it tries to parse hosts.

For something this simple, it is probably sufficient to simply let the shell do word splitting by removing the double quotes:

With the help of @Zeitounator, I have solved the issue.

The iptables variable is a dictionary with several levels and I have two more variables nets and ifcfg that are also dictionaries with several levels.

Many values of iptables are set with values from ifcfg that are set using values from nets.

I have managed to set values in iptables using values from nets directly and now the evaluation of iptables is as fast as the other variables.

You can't use this kind of for loop in a variables file or a playbook - it only works in template files. To acheive what you're after, you can use product filters, as described https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/user_guide/playbooks_filters.html#products

In your example, you would have:

To refer to your module, instead of:

I was mixing up the users on my server. I fixed this by specifying to run as ubuntu for the update command.

The issue is that in check mode, the user module only checks whether or not the user exists. The solution is to add a task to your playbook that ensures the group exists as well:

You have used to_json on a dict value that is, itself, going to be to_json-ed; ansible cannot transmit a python dict over HTTP, so any yaml structure that is not already a string needs to be converted into one first

What you'll want is just that lookup result (which will return a str, not a dict) and then ansible will apply to_json to the whole body: value for the aforementioned reason

However, because ansible is trying to be "helpful", it will auto-coerce a yaml value that it finds starting with { back into a dict -- that's why you just need to send the result of lookup through the | string filter to reinforce to ansible that yes, you really do want it to remain a str in that context

Disclaimer: I have no experience with GCP and nothing to correctly test this against. Meanwhile I have some experience in reading ansible documentation and testing module usage for correct parameters (at least at pure ansible level...)

As I first did, you probably flew over the documentation and its examples a little to fast ;). Meanwhile the specific parameter description is very clear:

network - dictionary

Hence a str is definitely not what is expected, as explicitely reported by your error message. We get more information in the comment:

[...] This field represents a link to a Network resource in GCP. It can be specified in two ways. First, you can place a dictionary with key selfLink and value of your resource's selfLink Alternatively, you can add register: name-of-resource to a gcp_compute_network task and then set this network field to {{ name-of-resource }}

If you look correctly at the examples, you'll see that they demonstrate the second scenario above (creating/registering a network to use the registered var directly in that parameter).

Taking for granted your own example in your question is using a ressource selfLink (have no clue if your current value looks correct or not...), I guess you should modify your definition as follows (abridged to network interfaces only):