- AnsibleFest
- Products
- Community
- Webinars & Training
- Blog

Documentation

# Tests

Topics

- Tests
  - Testing strings
  - Version Comparison
  - Group theory tests
  - Testing paths
  - Task results

Tests in Jinja2 are a way of evaluating template expressions and returning True or False. Jinja2 ships with many of these. See builtin tests in the official Jinja2 template documentation. Tests are very similar to filters and are used mostly the same way, but they can also be used in list processing filters, like C(map()) and C(select()) to choose items in the list.

Like all templating, tests always execute on the Ansible controller, not on the target of a task, as they test local data.

In addition to those Jinja2 tests, Ansible supplies a few more and users can easily create their own.

## Testing strings

To match strings against a substring or a regex, use the “match” or “search” filter:

    vars:
      url: "http://example.com/users/foo/resources/bar"

    tasks:
        - debug: "msg='matched pattern 1'"
          when: url | match("http://example.com/users/.*/resources/.*")

        - debug: "msg='matched pattern 2'"
          when: url | search("/users/.*/resources/.*")

        - debug: "msg='matched pattern 3'"
          when: url | search("/users/")

‘match’ requires a complete match in the string, while ‘search’ only requires matching a subset of the string.

## Version Comparison

New in version 1.6.

To compare a version number, such as checking if the `ansible_distribution_version` version is greater than or equal to ‘12.04’, you can use the `version_compare` filter.

The `version_compare` filter can also be used to evaluate the `ansible_distribution_version`:

    {{ ansible_distribution_version | version_compare('12.04', '>=') }}

If `ansible_distribution_version` is greater than or equal to 12, this filter returns True, otherwise False.

The `version_compare` filter accepts the following operators:

    <, lt, <=, le, >, gt, >=, ge, ==, =, eq, !=, <>, ne

This test also accepts a 3rd parameter, `strict` which defines if strict version parsing should be used. The default is `False`, but this setting as `True` uses more strict version parsing:

    {{ sample_version_var | version_compare('1.0', operator='lt', strict=True) }}

## Group theory tests

New in version 2.1.

To see if a list includes or is included by another list, you can use ‘issubset’ and ‘issuperset’:

    vars:
        a: [1,2,3,4,5]
        b: [2,3]
    tasks:
        - debug: msg="A includes B"
          when: a|issuperset(b)

        - debug: msg="B is included in A"
          when: b|issubset(a)

New in version 2.4.

You can use any and all to check if any or all elements in a list are true or not:

    vars:
      mylist:
          - 1
          - 3 == 3
          - True
      myotherlist:
          - False
          - True
    tasks:

      - debug: msg="all are true!"
        when: mylist is all

      - debug: msg="at least one is true"
        when: myotherlist|any

## Testing paths

The following tests can provide information about a path on the controller:

    - debug: msg="path is a directory"
      when: mypath|is_dir

    - debug: msg="path is a file"
      when: mypath|is_file

    - debug: msg="path is a symlink"
      when: mypath|is_link

    - debug: msg="path already exists"
      when: mypath|exists

    - debug: msg="path is {{ (mypath|is_abs)|ternary('absolute','relative')}}"

    - debug: msg="path is the same file as path2"
      when: mypath|samefile(path2)

    - debug: msg="path is a mount"
      when: mypath|is_mount

## Task results

The following tasks are illustrative of the tests meant to check the status of tasks:

    tasks:

      - shell: /usr/bin/foo
        register: result
        ignore_errors: True

      - debug: msg="it failed"
        when: result|failed

      # in most cases you'll want a handler, but if you want to do something right now, this is nice
      - debug: msg="it changed"
        when: result|changed

      - debug: msg="it succeeded in Ansible >= 2.1"
        when: result|succeeded

      - debug: msg="it succeeded"
        when: result|success

      - debug: msg="it was skipped"
        when: result|skipped

Note

From 2.1, you can also use success, failure, change, and skip so that the grammar matches, for those who need to be strict about it.

See also

Playbooks
  An introduction to playbooks
Conditionals
  Conditional statements in playbooks
Variables
  All about variables
Loops
  Looping in playbooks
Roles
  Playbook organization by roles
Best Practices
  Best practices in playbooks
User Mailing List
  Have a question? Stop by the google group!
irc.freenode.net
  #ansible IRC chat channel