Learning Ansible 2 - Second Edition

Tasks blocks

In Ansible 2.0 blocks have been made available. Blocks allow you to group tasks in a logical way and they can also help for a better error handling. The majority of properties you can add to a standard task, you can also add it to the blocks. You may need to perform a yum task to install NTPd and enable of the service only if the machine is CentOS. To do so, the following code can be used:

    tasks:
    - block:
       - name: Ensure NTPd is present
       yum:
         name: ntpd
         state: present
       - name: Ensure NTPd is running
       service:
         name: ntpd
         state: started
       enabled: True
     when: ansible_distribution == 'CentOS'

As you can notice, the when clause has been applied to the block so all tasks within the block ...