Ansible loop provides a lot of methods to repeat certain tasks until a condition is met. A basic example which can be used to install a lot of Linux packages can be written like the below example.

- name: Ansible Loop example
  apt:
    name: "{{ item }}"
    state: present
  with_items:
     - python3
     - ca-certificates
     - git

In the above task, instead of writing 3 separate task we have consolidated them into a single task. In each iteration, the value of with_items block will be inserted in place of {{ item }}.

Ansible loop with Index In some scenarios knowing the index value might come in handy. You can use the “with indexed_items” for this. The loop index will be available at item.0 and the value will be available at item.1. index value starts at zero as usual.

- hosts: all
  tasks:
  - name: Ansible loop with index example
    debug:
      msg: "echo loop index at {{ item.0 }} and value at {{item.1}}"
    with_indexed_items:
      - "hello1"
      - "hello2"
      - "hello3"

You can also make changes to the index value like addition, subtraction etc.

 - name: Ansible loop with index modification example
    debug:
      msg: "echo loop index at {{ item.0 + 1}} and value at {{item.1}}"

Ansible loop with conditional

You can also use the “when” conditional statement along with the loop structure. Thus you can control the looping based on a variable or system facts. The following example will run the task when the loop value is the same as the “loop_1” variable. Note that “item” is not enclosed in double brackets.

- hosts: all
  vars:
    loop_1: "hello1"
  tasks:
  - name: Ansible loop with conditional example
    debug:
      msg: "{{ item }}"
    with_items:
      - "hello1"
      - "hello2"
      - "hello3"
    when: item == "{{ loop_1 }}"

You can also use the system facts to determine which items to run. For eg., the following tasks will be run only when the target machine is MacOSX.

- hosts: all
  tasks:
  - name: Ansible loop with conditional example
    debug:
      msg: "{{ item }}"
    with_items:
      - "hello1"
      - "hello2"
      - "hello3"
    when: ansible_distribution == "MacOSX"

Looping through Dictionaries

You can loop through Ansible dictionary variable using the with_dict parameter. In the following task, I have declared a variable ‘Fruits’ with 3 key-value pairs. I am using the with_dict to loop through all the values.

- hosts: all
  vars:
    Fruits:
      Apple: 'Red'
      Orange: 'Orange'
      Grapes: 'Greem'
  tasks:
  - name: Ansible dictionary loop Example
    debug:
      msg: "Key is {{ item.key}} and color is {{item.value}}"
    with_dict: "{{ Fruits }}"