How can I get the installed YUM packages with Ansible?

Question

I am trying to get all the installed YUM packages on an RHEL machine. I can easily get it through using shell commands which is not idempotent and would like to use the YUM command instead.

The shell command works fine:

- name: yum list packages
  shell: yum list installed > build_server_info.config

But when I try to use the YUM command, it just executes, but it does not give any results:

- name: yum_command
  action: yum list=${pkg} list=available

Answer 1

I can easily get it through using shell commands which is not idempotent

You can't really talk about idempotence, when you are querying the current state of a machine.

"Idempontent" means that the task will ensure the machine is in the desired state no matter how many times you run a certain task.

When you query current state, you don't describe the desired state. No matter what you do, what method you use, the term "idempotent" is just not applicable.

---

Regarding your example, which does not give you results - you have repeated twice the same argument list and the task should fail (it doesn't, which looks like an Ansible quirk).

To get a list of installed packages, you should use:

- name: yum_command 
  yum:
    list=installed
  register: yum_packages

- debug:
    var: yum_packages

It saves a list of dictionaries describing each package to a variable yum_packages.

You can then use a JSON Query Filter to get a single package (tar):

- debug: var=item
  with_items: "{{yum_packages|json_query(jsonquery)}}"
  vars:
    jsonquery: "results[?name=='tar']"

to get a result like this:

"item": {
    "arch": "x86_64",
    "epoch": "2",
    "name": "tar",
    "nevra": "2:tar-1.26-31.el7.x86_64",
    "release": "31.el7",
    "repo": "installed",
    "version": "1.26",
    "yumstate": "installed"
}

Or only its version:

- debug: var=item
  with_items: "{{yum_packages|json_query(jsonquery)}}"
  vars:
    jsonquery: "results[?name=='tar'].version"

"item": "1.26"

Answer 2

Since Ansible 2.5, you can also use the package_facts module: it will gather the list of installed packages as Ansible facts.

Example from the CPU:

- name: get the rpm package facts
  package_facts:
    manager: rpm

- name: show them
  debug: var=ansible_facts.packages

Answer 3

Well, the official Ansible documentation for the yum module describes list as:

"Various (non-idempotent) commands for usage with /usr/bin/ansible and not playbooks."

so you're going to be out of luck with finding an idempotent list invocation.

If you just want to suppress the changed output, set the changed_when parameter to False.

(Also, having the duplicate list parameter is suspicious.)

Answer 4

If your requirement is to check for only one package, and based on that you want to execute another task, you can use package_facts module as

- name: install docker community edition in rhel8
  hosts: localhost
  connection: local

  tasks:
   - name: Gather the rpm package facts
     package_facts:
       manager: auto

   - name: check if docker-ce is already installed
     debug:
       var: ansible_facts.packages['docker-ce']


   - name: using command module to install docker-ce
     command: yum install docker-ce --nobest -y
     when: "'docker-ce' not in ansible_facts.packages"
     register: install_res

   - name: whether docker is installed now
     debug:
       var: install_res