ansible-cached-lookup

An Ansible lookup plugin that caches the results of any other lookup, most useful in group/host vars.

By default, Ansible evaluates any lookups in a group/host var whenever the var is accessed. For example, given a group/host var:

content: "{{ lookup('pipe', 'a-very-slow-command' }}"

any tasks that access content (e.g. in a template) will re-evaluate the lookup, which adds up very quickly. See ansible/ansible#9263.

Installation

1. Pick a name that you want to use to call this plugin in Ansible playbooks. This documentation assumes you're using the name cached.

   pip install ansible-cached-lookup
   

2. Create a lookup_plugins directory in the directory in which you run Ansible.

   By default, Ansible will look for lookup plugins in an lookup_plugins folder adjacent to the running playbook. For more information on this, or to change the location where Ansible looks for lookup plugins, see the Ansible docs.

3. Create a file called cached.py (or whatever name you picked) in the lookup_plugins directory, with one line:

   from ansible_cached_lookup import LookupModule
   

Contributing

To run the tests, run tox.

To format code to pass tox -e lint, run tox -e format.