How to loop through interface facts

Solution 1:

You came across one of the limitations of Jinja/Ansible templating, namely there is no way to evaluate expressions, which would be required to get to the value of something like ansible_{{ item }}. You're stuck with a string.

Fortunately there is the global hostvars object where you can access all the facts by key, which is... a string.

Something along these lines should get you there:

tasks:
  - name: find interface facts
    debug:
      msg: "{{ hostvars[inventory_hostname]['ansible_%s' | format(item)] }}"
    with_items: "{{ ansible_interfaces }}"

Solution 2:

You actually can do this.You just have to know j2 syntax pretty well, search a little bit and combine it with some hacks. DOH. just lost 2 hours. Hope I save it to someone!

It's doable like this:

    - name: Display all interfaces
  debug:
    msg: "{{ msg.split('\n') }}"
  vars:
    msg: |
        {% for iface in ansible_interfaces|sort %}
            System interface {{ iface }}
            {{ vars.ansible_facts[iface] | to_nice_json }}
        {% endfor %}

And as I suspect, the people searching to do this, want to calculate the next free interface (which I was after for).

I did it like this:

    - name: calc next free interface
      set_fact:
        nextFreeIf: "{% set ifacePrefix = vars.ansible_default_ipv4.alias %}{% set ifaceNum = { 'cnt': 0 } %}{% macro increment(dct, key, inc=1)%}{% if dct.update({key: dct[key] + inc}) %} {% endif %}{% endmacro %}{% for iface in ansible_interfaces|sort %}{% if iface| regex_search('^' ~ vars.ansible_default_ipv4.alias) %}{{ increment(ifaceNum, 'cnt') }}{% endif %}{% endfor %}{{ifacePrefix}}:{{ifaceNum.cnt}}"

the nextFreeIf is on one line, because, otherwise you get empty spaces and headaches to trim it. It's ugly, but hey, it works.

Really hope to save someones time. Cheers.