vars_prompt & Environment Variables

We missed a deploy step! We're not clearing Symfony's cache. That sounds like a job for a new task! Call it "Clear Cache". It's easy: we just need to run a command: {{ symfony_console_path }} cache:clear --env=prod:

Easy! Except... that --env=prod part is interesting. Sometimes I might want to deploy our app in the prod environment - like if we're deploying to production. But other times, like if we're deploying to some test machine, I might want to deploy our app in the dev environment.

What I'm saying is: I want that environment to be configurable. And actually, this is important in two places: here, and when installing the Composer dependencies.

Symfony Composer Deps in the prod Environment

Google for "Symfony deploy" to find a page on Symfony.com. Scroll down to a section about installing and updating your vendors. Ah, so it recommends that when you deploy, you use:

composer install --no-dev

That's actually what the composer module tried to do by default. But then we - via a no_dev option - told it to stop that nonsense!

We had to do that because some of the Composer post-install commands in a Symfony app require the packages in the require-dev section.

In reality, this --no-dev flag is not a big deal. But, we can use it... as long as we set an environment variable: SYMFONY_ENV=prod. Yep, those problematic post-install commands are setup to look for this environment variable, and not to do certain things rely on the require-dev dependencies.

So this is our mission: make the environment configurable, use it in the "Clear Cache" task and set a new environment variable.

Prompting for Input?

How? Start at the top: add a new vars_prompt key with name set to symfony_env:

Then, prompt: Enter the environment for your Symfony app (prod|dev|test):

As you're probably guessing, Ansible will now ask us what environment we want to use. Set a default value to prod and private: no - you can set that to yes to obscure passwords as you type them:

Cool!

Setting an Environment Variable

Next question: how can we use this variable to set an environment variable? How about... an environment key! Yep, setting environment variables is a native task for Ansible. Set SYMFONY_ENV to {{ symfony_env|lower }}:

This uses the variable we just set... but pipes it through a lower filter... just in case we get crazy and use upper-case letters.

To see what this all looks like, at the top, let's debug some variables. First, debug one called ansible_env:

This is a built-in variable that has a lot of info about the "host" environment - meaning, the machine (or machines) that you're running Ansible against. It should also contain our environment variable.

Let's also debug the symfony_env variable that we set above:

Oh, and down on the "Clear Cache" task, I forgot to add the tag for deploy:

Change over to your terminal and run the playbook - but take off the -t option so that everything runs:

ansible-playbook ansible/playbook.yml -i ansible/hosts.ini

Yes! Right at the start, it asks us for the environment. I'll leave it blank to use prod. Then, hit ctrl+c to quit: we can already see the variables!

First, it printed ansible_env... which has some pretty cool stuff! It has a HOME key for the home directory, PWD for the current directory and other goodies. AND, it has SYMFONY_ENV set to prod. Not surprisingly, the symfony_env variable also prints prod.

Try this again.. but be tricky... with an uppercase PROD:

ansible-playbook ansible/playbook.yml -i ansible/hosts.ini

Yep! The environment variable was lowercased, but not the symfony_env variable. That's no surprise... but if we want to guard against this, it will be a problem in a minute when we try to use this in more places... like down on my "Clear Cache" task:

We could keep using the lower filter. But, there's a cooler way: a "pre task".