# here's a cool advanced topic about how to perform conditional logic in ansible without resorting # to writing your own module that defines facts. You can do that too, and it's easy to do, but # often you just want to run a command and then decide whether to run some steps or not. That's # easy to do, and here we'll show you how. - name: test playbook user: root hosts: all tasks: # it is possible to save the result of any command in a named register. This variable will be made # available to tasks and templates made further down in the execution flow. Here we save the result # of a simple 'cat' command in a variable called 'motd_contents' - action: shell cat /etc/motd register: motd_contents # and here we access the register. Note that motd_contents as a variable is structured data because # it is a return from the command module. The shell module makes available variables such as # as 'stdout', 'stderr', and 'rc'. Here's a rather trivial example that runs an arbitrary step # if and only if the motd file contained the word 'hi'. Remember that only_if statements are # Python expressions. This is as complicated as Ansible syntax is going to get, and the only # time python really seeps into ansible's language. - action: shell echo "motd contains the word hi" only_if: "'${motd_contents.stdout}'.find('hi') != -1"