How to Include Variables in Ansible + Examples

Written by Percy Grunwald

— Last Updated February 4, 2024

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I’m aware of two ways to include variables from another file in Ansible:

1. The include_vars module (works in any list of tasks, such as a playbook or role)
2. The vars_files keyword (works on plays only)

There are a number of reasons you might want to move variables into separate files when using Ansible:

1. Refactoring - group long lists of variables together into smaller files
2. Conditionally include variables - you may wish to load different variables based on host-specific properties or in response to tasks

I have included the most common use cases I can think of for include_vars and vars_files in the sections below.

How to use include_vars

The include_vars module can be used in a playbook or role to load variables from a file. Simply set the value of include_vars to a local file to load the variables it contains:

---
# ./hello_world.yml

- name: print greeting
  hosts: "*"
  tasks:
    - include_vars: name_vars.yml

    - debug: msg="Hello, {{ name }}!"

name_vars.yml can be located in the same directory as hello_world.yml, or inside ./vars/ (I prefer to put variable files into ./vars/). The ./vars/name_vars.yml file looks like this:

---
# ./vars/name_vars.yml

name: World

The playbook above will produce the following output:

ok: [123.123.123.123] => {
    "msg": "Hello, World!"
}

Be careful: any variables you set with set_fact will not be overwritten with include_vars due to the variable precedence of different sources in Ansible.

For example, if you change the tasks file from above to be like this:

---
# ./hello_world.yml

- name: print greeting
  hosts: "*"
  tasks:
    - set_fact: name=Percy

    - include_vars: name_vars.yml

    - debug: msg="Hello, {{ name }}!"

Despite having include_vars after set_fact, the output will look like this:

ok: [123.123.123.123] => {
    "msg": "Hello, Percy!"
}

How to include variables conditionally

You can conditionally include variables by using the when keyword.

Similar to the example above, you can include variable files based on the OS family of the remote host:

---
# ./redis.yml

- name: print redis package
  hosts: "*"
  tasks:
    - include_vars: vars-Debian.yml
      when: ansible_os_family == 'Debian'

    - include_vars: vars-RedHat.yml
      when: ansible_os_family == 'RedHat'

    - debug: var=redis_package

Where the variable files look like this:

---
# ./vars/vars-Debian.yml

redis_package: redis-server

---
# ./vars/vars-RedHat.yml

redis_package: redis

The debug task from above will print the following:

ok: [centos_7] => {
    "redis_package": "redis"
}
ok: [ubuntu_bionic_1804] => {
    "redis_package": "redis-server"
}

How to include variables with a dynamic file name

You can make the previous example more terse by calling include_vars with a dynamic filename based on the ansible_os_family variable:

- include_vars: "vars-{{ ansible_os_family }}.yml"

- debug: var=redis_package

These tasks will behave in the same way as the previous example:

ok: [centos_7] => {
    "redis_package": "redis"
}
ok: [ubuntu_bionic_1804] => {
    "redis_package": "redis-server"
}

How to include variables from an Ansible vault file

Including variables from an Ansible Vault file works the same way as including a regular plaintext vars file. A common pattern I use in my playbooks is something like this:

---
# ./configure_app_servers.yml

- name: configure app servers
  hosts: app_servers
  pre_tasks:
    - name: include env vars
      include_vars: "{{ env }}.yml"
      tags: ["always"]

    - name: include vault for env
      include_vars: "{{ env }}.vault.yml"
      tags: ["always"]
  roles:
    ...

As you can see in the example above, the regular vars file and the vault file are included in the same way with include_vars. Ansible will automatically detect whether or not the file is an Ansible Vault file and decrypt it accordingly. This same functionality can also be achieved using vars_files on the play, please see the following sections to see how this is done.

You can set env by passing the --extra-vars option to ansible-playbook:

$ ansible-playbook configure_app_servers.yml --extra-vars "env=prod"

You can set env to one of dev, staging, prod etc. For the prod env, you could have variable like this:

---
# ./vars/prod.yml

domain: example.com
rails_env: production
https: true

The prod.vault.yml would look like this in plain text:

$ANSIBLE_VAULT;1.1;AES256
3462353065386462383165626...
...

But would print this when viewed with ansible-vault view ./vars/prod.vault.yml:

---
# ./vars/prod.vault.yml

database_password: "94BqEabtebgzbQItkqPEVMyqjKbp57Gc"
api_key: "xVQKRARKgcwDktPCJjYRFiqmHGsvNFd9"

How to include variables for each item in a loop

The example from the previous section could be more terse if you used a loop with include_vars rather than a two separate tasks:

---
# ./configure_app_servers.yml

- name: configure app servers
  hosts: app_servers
  pre_tasks:
    - name: include vars and vault for env
      include_vars: "{{ item }}.yml"
      tags: ["always"]
      loop:
        - "{{ env }}"
        - "{{ env }}.vault"
  roles:
    ...

For env: prod, the loop above would include variables from prod.yml as well as prod.vault.yml just like in the previous section.

How to include variables using vars_files on a play

You could further improve the example above by using the vars_files keyword on the play. Note that you need to prepend ./vars/ to the file path when using the vars_file keyword:

---
# ./configure_app_servers.yml

- name: configure app servers
  hosts: app_servers
  vars_files:
    - "./vars/{{ env }}.yml"
    - "./vars/{{ env }}.vault.yml"
  roles:
    ...

This is an efficient and readable way to include variables in a play.

Do you have any other use cases or examples that I didn’t cover? Hit me up in the comments and let’s discuss! 😃

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