ansible/docs/docsite/rst/user_guide/playbooks_lookups.rst
Alicia Cozine b57444af14
Rebased pr73824 (#73934)
Co-authored-by: Eugene <k.evgen61@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: Alicia Cozine <acozine@users.noreply.github.com>
2021-03-17 16:07:38 -04:00

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.. _playbooks_lookups:
*******
Lookups
*******
Lookup plugins retrieve data from outside sources such as files, databases, key/value stores, APIs, and other services. Like all templating, lookups execute and are evaluated on the Ansible control machine. Ansible makes the data returned by a lookup plugin available using the standard templating system. Before Ansible 2.5, lookups were mostly used indirectly in ``with_<lookup>`` constructs for looping. Starting with Ansible 2.5, lookups are used more explicitly as part of Jinja2 expressions fed into the ``loop`` keyword.
.. _lookups_and_variables:
Using lookups in variables
==========================
You can populate variables using lookups. Ansible evaluates the value each time it is executed in a task (or template)::
vars:
motd_value: "{{ lookup('file', '/etc/motd') }}"
tasks:
- debug:
msg: "motd value is {{ motd_value }}"
For more details and a list of lookup plugins in ansible-core, see :ref:`plugins_lookup`. You may also find lookup plugins in collections. You can review a list of lookup plugins installed on your control machine with the command ``ansible-doc -l -t lookup``.
.. seealso::
:ref:`working_with_playbooks`
An introduction to playbooks
:ref:`playbooks_conditionals`
Conditional statements in playbooks
:ref:`playbooks_variables`
All about variables
:ref:`playbooks_loops`
Looping in playbooks
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