Setting the Environment (and Working With Proxies)¶

New in version 1.1.

It is quite possible that you may need to get package updates through a proxy, or even get some package updates through a proxy and access other packages not through a proxy. Or maybe a script you might wish to call may also need certain environment variables set to run properly.

Ansible makes it easy for you to configure your environment by using the ‘environment’ keyword. Here is an example:

- hosts: all
  remote_user: root

  tasks:

    - apt: name=cobbler state=installed
      environment:
        http_proxy: http://proxy.example.com:8080

The environment can also be stored in a variable, and accessed like so:

- hosts: all
  remote_user: root

  # here we make a variable named "proxy_env" that is a dictionary
  vars:
    proxy_env:
      http_proxy: http://proxy.example.com:8080

  tasks:

    - apt: name=cobbler state=installed
      environment: proxy_env

While just proxy settings were shown above, any number of settings can be supplied. The most logical place to define an environment hash might be a group_vars file, like so:

---
# file: group_vars/boston

ntp_server: ntp.bos.example.com
backup: bak.bos.example.com
proxy_env:
  http_proxy: http://proxy.bos.example.com:8080
  https_proxy: http://proxy.bos.example.com:8080