Ansible-core 2.15 Porting Guide
This section discusses the behavioral changes between ansible-core
2.14 and ansible-core
2.15.
It is intended to assist in updating your playbooks, plugins and other parts of your Ansible infrastructure so they will work with this version of Ansible.
We suggest you read this page along with ansible-core Changelog for 2.15 to understand what updates you may need to make.
This document is part of a collection on porting. The complete list of porting guides can be found at porting guides.
Playbook
Conditionals - due to mitigation of security issue CVE-2023-5764 in ansible-core 2.15.7, conditional expressions with embedded template blocks can fail with the message “
Conditional is marked as unsafe, and cannot be evaluated.
” when an embedded template consults data from untrusted sources like module results or vars marked!unsafe
. Conditionals with embedded templates can be a source of malicious template injection when referencing untrusted data, and can nearly always be rewritten without embedded templates. Playbook task conditional keywords such aswhen
anduntil
have long displayed warnings discouraging use of embedded templates in conditionals; this warning has been expanded to non-task conditionals as well, such as theassert
action.- name: task with a module result (always untrusted by Ansible) shell: echo "hi mom" register: untrusted_result # don't do it this way... # - name: insecure conditional with embedded template consulting untrusted data # assert: # that: '"hi mom" is in {{ untrusted_result.stdout }}' - name: securely access untrusted values directly as Jinja variables instead assert: that: '"hi mom" is in untrusted_result.stdout'
Handlers
As documented, if multiple handlers of a specific name have been defined, the last one added into the play is the one that is executed when being notified. Prior to ansible-core
2.15, this was not the case for handlers included dynamically into the play with the include_role
task. This issue has been addressed in ansible-core
2.15, and users relying on the ansible-core
2.14 and older behavior may need to adjust their playbooks accordingly.
As an example of the behavior change, consider the following:
- include_role: name: foo vars: invocation: 1 - block: - include_role: name: foo vars: invocation: 2 when: inventory_hostname == "bar" - meta: flush_handlers
Note
The example assumes there is a task within the role foo
that notifies a handler named foo_handler
within the role foo
.
Note
The fact that different variables and/or their values are attached to include_role
tasks including the same role makes them distinct roles.
Note
The second invocation of the include_role
task results in including tasks and handlers from the role regardless of the when
conditional evaluation result. The when
conditional is attached to the block
wrapping the include_role
task and as such the when
conditional is applied to all tasks and handlers from the role after they are included into the play.
By the time the flush_handlers
task runs, all hosts notified foo_handler
within the first invocation of include_role
. Additionally the host bar
(due to when
restricting all other hosts) notified foo_handler
again during the second invocation of include_role
.
On ansible-core
2.15, the last handler named foo_handler
added into the play is from the second include_role
invocation and therefore has when: inventory_hostname == "bar"
attached to it, resulting in the handler being actually run only on the host bar
and skipped on all other hosts. Consequently the notifications from the host bar
have been de-duplicated.
On ansible-core
2.14 and older, foo_handler
from the first invocation runs on all hosts. Additionally, foo_handler
from the second invocation is run on the host bar
again.
Command Line
The return code of
ansible-galaxy search
is now 0 instead of 1 and the stdout is empty when results are empty to align with otheransible-galaxy
commands.
Deprecated
Providing a list of dictionaries to
vars:
is deprecated in favor of supplying a dictionary.Instead of:
vars: - var1: foo - var2: bar
Use:
vars: var1: foo var2: bar
Modules
No notable changes
Modules removed
The following modules no longer exist:
No notable changes
Deprecation notices
No notable changes
Noteworthy module changes
No notable changes
Plugins
No notable changes
Porting custom scripts
No notable changes
Networking
No notable changes