Question

Ansible playbook error: mapping values are not allowed in this context

Posted August 7, 2019 12.9k views
AnsibleUbuntu 18.04

I am trying to play with Ansible a little bit and I’ve created a test playbook but it is failing for some reason and I can’t figure out why. I’ve tested the connectivity between my control node and the worker node but when I try to run my playbook I get this error:

ERROR! Syntax Error while loading YAML.
  mapping values are not allowed in this context

The error appears to have been in '/root/ansible/setup.yaml': line 9, column 12, but may
be elsewhere in the file depending on the exact syntax problem.

The offending line appears to be:

- name: Apache started
    service:
           ^ here

I can not see anything wrong with the service part in my playbook. Here’s what I currently have:

---
- hosts: webservers
  vars:
    my_service: apache2
    desired_state: started

  tasks:
- name: Apache started
    service:
      name:  "{{ my_service }}"
      state: "{{ desired_state }}"

Has anyone seen this error before?

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2 answers
bobbyiliev August 7, 2019

Hello,

The playbook looks good, there’s only a slight indentation error, Yaml is very strict about the indentations and the spacing.

You need to make sure that you have two spaces before the - name part of your playbook. So it would look something like this:

---
- hosts: webservers
  vars:
    my_service: apache2
    desired_state: started

  tasks:
  - name: Apache started
    service:
      name:  "{{ my_service }}"
      state: "{{ desired_state }}"

Hope that this helps!
Regards,
Bobby

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saikumartrainings December 21, 2019

I am getting error with the below yaml file.please help

vi nginx-install.yml

  • name: This is my first Ansible playbook to install nginx hosts: all become: true

tasks:
-name: install nginx
yum:
name: nginx
state: latest

service:
name: nginx
state: started

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  • bobbyiliev December 21, 2019

    Hello,

    You need to adjust this a little bit to:

    ---
- hosts: webservers
  become: yes
  tasks:
  - name: Install Nginx Latest
    yum:
      name: nginx
      state: latest
  - name: Start Nginx
    service:
      name: nginx
      state: started

    This should work.

    If you get any errors, feel free to share them here.

    Regards,
    Bobby

    Reply Report
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