Ansible-core 2.12 Porting Guide 

This section discusses the behavioral changes between ansible-core 2.11 and ansible-core 2.12.

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 2.12 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 

When calling tasks and setting async, setting ANSIBLE_ASYNC_DIR under environment: is no longer valid. Instead, use the shell configuration variable async_dir, for example by setting ansible_async_dir:

tasks:
  - dnf:
      name: '*'
      state: latest
    async: 300
    poll: 5
    vars:
      ansible_async_dir: /path/to/my/custom/dir

The undef() function is added to the templating environment for creating undefined variables directly in a template. Optionally, a hint may be provided for variables which are intended to be overridden.

vars:
  old: "{{ undef }}"
  new: "{{ undef() }}"
  new_with_hint: "{{ undef(hint='You must override this variable') }}"

Python Interpreter Discovery 

The default value of INTERPRETER_PYTHON changed to auto. The list of Python interpreters in INTERPRETER_PYTHON_FALLBACK changed to prefer Python 3 over Python 2. The combination of these two changes means the new default behavior is to quietly prefer Python 3 over Python 2 on remote hosts. Previously a deprecation warning was issued in situations where interpreter discovery would have used Python 3 but the interpreter was set to /usr/bin/python.

INTERPRETER_PYTHON_FALLBACK can be changed from the default list of interpreters by setting the ansible_interpreter_python_fallback variable.

See interpreter discovery documentation for more details.

Command Line 

Python 3.8 on the controller node is a hard requirement for this release. The command line scripts will not function with a lower Python version.
ansible-vault no longer supports PyCrypto and requires cryptography.

Deprecated 

Python 2.6 on the target node is deprecated in this release. ansible-core 2.13 will remove support for Python 2.6.
Bare variables in conditionals: when conditionals no longer automatically parse string booleans such as "true" and "false" into actual booleans. Any variable containing a non-empty string is considered true. This was previously configurable with the CONDITIONAL_BARE_VARS configuration option (and the ANSIBLE_CONDITIONAL_BARE_VARS environment variable). This setting no longer has any effect. Users can work around the issue by using the |bool filter:

vars:
  teardown: 'false'

tasks:
  - include_tasks: teardown.yml
    when: teardown | bool

  - include_tasks: provision.yml
    when: not teardown | bool

The _remote_checksum() method in ActionBase is deprecated. Any action plugin using this method should use _execute_remote_stat() instead.

Modules 

cron now requires name to be specified in all cases.
cron no longer allows a reboot parameter. Use special_time: reboot instead.
hostname - On FreeBSD, the before result will no longer be "temporarystub" if permanent hostname file does not exist. It will instead be "" (empty string) for consistency with other systems.
hostname - On OpenRC and Solaris based systems, the before result will no longer be "UNKNOWN" if the permanent hostname file does not exist. It will instead be "" (empty string) for consistency with other systems.
pip now uses the pip Python module installed for the Ansible module’s Python interpreter, if available, unless executable or virtualenv were specified.

Modules removed 

The following modules no longer exist:

No notable changes

unique filter with Jinja2 < 2.10 is case-sensitive and now raise coherently an error if case_sensitive=False instead of when case_sensitive=True.
Set theory filters (intersect, difference, symmetric_difference and union) are now case-sensitive. Explicitly use case_sensitive=False to keep previous behavior. Note: with Jinja2 < 2.10, the filters were already case-sensitive by default.
password_hash now uses passlib defaults when an option is unspecified, for example bcrypt_sha256 now default to the “2b” format and if the “2a” format is required it must be specified.

Porting custom scripts 

No notable changes

Networking 