Question

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

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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Bobby Iliev
Site Moderator
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• August 7, 2019
Accepted Answer

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

basavarajbhavi • July 7, 2021

check the ansible version and upgrade it and check python version also as stack require higher version of ansible and python

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tuba • November 8, 2020

Hello, I am getting a similar error with td-agent file. I checked on various pages but not clear yet.

ERROR: ERROR! We were unable to read either as JSON nor YAML, these are the errors we got from each: JSON: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)

Syntax Error while loading YAML. did not find expected <document start>

The error appears to be in '/address/to/path/log-aggregator.yml: be elsewhere in the file depending on the exact syntax problem.

<store>
    @type s3
    s3_bucket {{ s3_bucket_name }}
    s3_region {{ s3_bucket_region }}
    s3_object_key_format %{path}/name%{time_slice}.json.%{file_extension}
    path platform/core_name_log_v1_1m/%Y/%m/%d/%H
    time_slice_format %Y%m%d_%H%M
    store_as gzip
    include_tag_key true
    tag_key tag
    buffer_type file
    buffer_path /var/log/td-agent/cello/core/name
    buffer_queue_limit 512
    buffer_chunk_limit 2m
    flush_interval 10s
    utc
    grant_full_control id=jh11qfhj67676le1p092f2xxuxxxxxxxxxxxxx3b5609t2ff6d77771020129356
    check_object false
  </store>