Ansible-core 2.15 Porting Guide 

This section discusses the behavioral changes between ansible-core 2.14 and ansible-core 2.15.

It is intended to assist in updating your playbooks, plugins and other parts of your Ansible infrastructure so they will work with this version of Ansible.

We suggest you read this page along with ansible-core Changelog for 2.15 to understand what updates you may need to make.

This document is part of a collection on porting. The complete list of porting guides can be found at porting guides.

Playbook 

Conditionals - due to mitigation of security issue CVE-2023-5764 in ansible-core 2.15.7, conditional expressions with embedded template blocks can fail with the message “Conditional is marked as unsafe, and cannot be evaluated.” when an embedded template consults data from untrusted sources like module results or vars marked !unsafe. Conditionals with embedded templates can be a source of malicious template injection when referencing untrusted data, and can nearly always be rewritten without embedded templates. Playbook task conditional keywords such as when and until have long displayed warnings discouraging use of embedded templates in conditionals; this warning has been expanded to non-task conditionals as well, such as the assert action.
```
- name: task with a module result (always untrusted by Ansible)
  shell: echo "hi mom"
  register: untrusted_result

# don't do it this way...
# - name: insecure conditional with embedded template consulting untrusted data
#   assert:
#     that: '"hi mom" is in {{ untrusted_result.stdout }}'

- name: securely access untrusted values directly as Jinja variables instead
  assert:
    that: '"hi mom" is in untrusted_result.stdout'
```

As documented, if multiple handlers of a specific name have been defined, the last one added into the play is the one that is executed when being notified. Prior to ansible-core 2.15, this was not the case for handlers included dynamically into the play with the include_role task. This issue has been addressed in ansible-core 2.15, and users relying on the ansible-core 2.14 and older behavior may need to adjust their playbooks accordingly.

As an example of the behavior change, consider the following:

- include_role:
    name: foo
  vars:
    invocation: 1

- block:
   - include_role:
       name: foo
     vars:
       invocation: 2
  when: inventory_hostname == "bar"

- meta: flush_handlers

Note

The example assumes there is a task within the role foo that notifies a handler named foo_handler within the role foo.

Note

The fact that different variables and/or their values are attached to include_role tasks including the same role makes them distinct roles.

Note

The second invocation of the include_role task results in including tasks and handlers from the role regardless of the when conditional evaluation result. The when conditional is attached to the block wrapping the include_role task and as such the when conditional is applied to all tasks and handlers from the role after they are included into the play.

By the time the flush_handlers task runs, all hosts notified foo_handler within the first invocation of include_role. Additionally the host bar (due to when restricting all other hosts) notified foo_handler again during the second invocation of include_role.

On ansible-core 2.15, the last handler named foo_handler added into the play is from the second include_role invocation and therefore has when: inventory_hostname == "bar" attached to it, resulting in the handler being actually run only on the host bar and skipped on all other hosts. Consequently the notifications from the host bar have been de-duplicated.

On ansible-core 2.14 and older, foo_handler from the first invocation runs on all hosts. Additionally, foo_handler from the second invocation is run on the host bar again.

Command Line 

The return code of ansible-galaxy search is now 0 instead of 1 and the stdout is empty when results are empty to align with other ansible-galaxy commands.

Deprecated 

Providing a list of dictionaries to vars: is deprecated in favor of supplying a dictionary.

Instead of:
```
vars:
  - var1: foo
  - var2: bar
```
Use:
```
vars:
  var1: foo
  var2: bar
```

Modules 

No notable changes

Modules removed 

The following modules no longer exist:

No notable changes

Ansible-core 2.15 Porting Guide 

Playbook 

Handlers 

Command Line 

Deprecated 

Modules 

Modules removed 

Deprecation notices 

Noteworthy module changes 

Plugins 

Porting custom scripts 

Networking 