Ansible has a great feature of registering results of a performed step. But recently I stumbled upon a need to do it against actions from a loop and then using the registered result in the next steps which are also looped. Most often, it can be used to perform some action only in case if a previous action changed a file.
Firstly, we register `action_state` variable. Its sub-dictionary `results` contains attribute `changed` which can be accessed as `action_state.results.changed`. Now, we need to get it into use in the next looped step. It can be done with ease using `with_together` operator:
- name: copy a file
copy:
src: '{{ source }}'
dest: '{{ target }}'
with_items: yourlist
when: item.state == 'present'
register: action_state
- name: create .ssh dir if file changed in the previous step
sudo_user: '{{ item.0.user }}'
file:
state: directory
path: '/home/{{ item.0.user }}/.ssh'
mode: 0700
with_together:
- yourlist
- action_state.results
when: item.1.changed and item.0.state == 'present'
Here, for the `yourlist` we copied some files to a target machine (i.e. public keys to some temp location) in the loop and then for each of the files performed an action only if a file was changed.
Cloud Application Security 