How to pass parameter from Jenkins job to Ansible playbook

Sat, Oct 15, 2016

#Ansible #Jenkins #devops

Sometimes, we might need to pass parameter from a Jenkins job to our Ansible playbook, for example, release version number. On my other post, I’ve written about how to run Ansible playbook from Jenkins job. And now, I am going to show you how to pass a parameter from Jenkins job to Ansible playbook.

First, let’s prepare a simple Ansible playbook that takes a parameter and display it.

---
- hosts: localhost
  vars: 
    - name: "John"
  tasks:
    - name: Print message
      debug: msg="Hello to {{name}}, from Ansible!!"

And when we run it, it will use the default value for variable “name”, which is “John”

$ ansible-playbook ansible.yml 
 [WARNING]: Host file not found: /etc/ansible/hosts

 [WARNING]: provided hosts list is empty, only localhost is available


PLAY [localhost] ***************************************************************

TASK [setup] *******************************************************************
ok: [localhost]

TASK [Print message] ***********************************************************
ok: [localhost] => {
    "msg": "Hello to John, from Ansible!!"
}

PLAY RECAP *********************************************************************
localhost                  : ok=2    changed=0    unreachable=0    failed=0

And if we specify the variable value for “name”.

$ ansible-playbook --extra-vars '{"name":"Thor"}' ansible.yml 
 [WARNING]: Host file not found: /etc/ansible/hosts

 [WARNING]: provided hosts list is empty, only localhost is available


PLAY [localhost] ***************************************************************

TASK [setup] *******************************************************************
ok: [localhost]

TASK [Print message] ***********************************************************
ok: [localhost] => {
    "msg": "Hello to Thor, from Ansible!!"
}

PLAY RECAP *********************************************************************
localhost                  : ok=2    changed=0    unreachable=0    failed=0   

As we can see here, it’s printing out “Hello to Thor, from Ansible!!” now. Looking good, let’s continue configuring the Jenkins job.

1. Create a new Jenkins job
2. Click on “Configure”
3. Check on the “This project is parameterized” checkbox
4. Select “String parameter” from “Add Parameter” dropdown
5. In the “Name” field, put the valu “NAME”
6. Then select “Invoke Ansible Playbook” from “Add build step” dropdown
7. Enter the location of the Ansible playbook and click on the “Advance” button
8. Enter “–extra-vars ‘{“name”:“${NAME}”}‘” in the “Additional parameters” textbox
9. Save the configuration.
10. Click on “Build with Parameters”
11. Enter anything in the “NAME” input box, for example, “Jackie”
12. Run and you can see the parameter is passed to Ansible playbook

Summary

In this post we’ve learned

• how to create a parameterized Jenkins job
• how to run and pass parameter to Ansible playbook
• how to pass parameter from a Jenkins job to Ansible playbook