Changing ansible loop due to v2.11 deprecation - linux

Question

I'm running a playbook which defined several packages to install via apt:
- name: Install utility packages common to all hosts
apt:
name: "{{ item }}"
state: present
autoclean: yes
with_items:
- aptitude
- jq
- curl
- git-core
- at
...
A recent ansible update on my system now renders this message concerning the playbook above:
[DEPRECATION WARNING]: Invoking "apt" only once while using a loop via squash_actions is deprecated. Instead of
using a loop to supply multiple items and specifying `name: {{ item }}`, please use `name: [u'aptitude',
u'jq', u'curl', u'git-core', u'at', u'heirloom-mailx', u'sudo-ldap', u'sysstat', u'vim', u'at', u'ntp',
u'stunnel', u'sysstat', u'arping', u'net-tools', u'lshw', u'screen', u'tmux', u'lsscsi']` and remove the loop.
If I'm understanding this correctly, Ansible now wants this list of packages as an array which leaves this:
name: [u'aptitude', u'jq', u'curl', u'git-core', u'at','heirloom-mailx', u'sudo-ldap', u'sysstat', u'vim', u'at', u'ntp',u'stunnel', u'sysstat', u'arping', u'net-tools', u'lshw', u'screen', u'tmux', u'lsscsi']
Is there a better way? Just seems like I'll be scrolling right forever in VIM trying to maintain this. Either that, or word wrap it and deal with a word-cloud of packages.

Answer 1

You can code the array in YAML style to make it more readable:
- name: Install utility packages common to all hosts
apt:
name:
- aptitude
- jq
- curl
- git-core
- at
state: present
autoclean: yes

Answer 2

I had this same question and it looks like each set of packages with the same states will have to be their own block. Looking at Ansible's documentation, they have a block for each state as an example so I took that example, cut up my packages based off their states and followed ignacio's example and it ended up working perfectly.
So basically it would look like this
- name: Install packages required for log-deployment
apt:
name:
- gcc
- python-devel
state: latest
autoclean: yes
- name: Install packages required for log-deployment
apt:
name:
- python
- mariadb
- mysql-devel
state: installed
Hope that makes sense and helps!

Answer 3

I came across this exact same problem , but with a much longer list of apps , held in a vars file. This is the code I implemented to get around that problem. The list of the apps is placed into the "apps" variable and Ansible iterates over that.
- name: Install default applications
apt:
name: "{{item}}"
state: latest
loop: "{{ apps }}"
when: ansible_distribution == 'Ubuntu' or ansible_distribution == 'Debian'
tags:
- instapps
The file holding the list of apps to install is in the Defaults directory in the role directory for this task - namely the "common" role directory.
roles
- common
- Defaults
- main.yml

Answer 4

For a record, you can have this written this way:
- name: Install utility packages common to all hosts
apt:
state: present
autoclean: yes
pkg: [
"aptitude",
"jq",
"curl",
"git-core",
"at",
]
however if you are upgrading existing roles to new apt's requirements, Ignacio's accepted answer is far better as all you need is just to add some indentation to already existing entries.