Ansible lookup variables and access values

I’m trying to achieve to lookup all variables in my Ansible configuration which end with "password" in their variables names. Then I would like to access the values of the password variables and check their character length.

I can lookup all my password variables with lookup('varnames', 'password') but then how do I loop over the result list and get their values?

I tried:

- name: Show passwords
  ansible.builtin.debug:
    msg: "{{ item }}"
  with_items: "{{ lookup('ansible.builtin.varnames', 'password') }}"

But what I am getting is the variable name itself:

ok: [host1] => (item=test_password,test_password_default,admin_password,ldap_password) => { "msg": "test_password,test_password_default,admin_password,ldap_password" }

I would like to get the variable values instead and then do an assertion of the character length.

Solution

By default the varnames lookup produces a single comma-delimited string. Add wantlist=true:

- name: Show passwords
  ansible.builtin.debug:
    msg: "{{ item }}"
  with_items: "{{ lookup('ansible.builtin.varnames', 'password', wantlist=true) }}"

Or use query instead of lookup (query always returns a list):

- name: Show passwords
  ansible.builtin.debug:
    msg: "{{ item }}"
  with_items: "{{ query('ansible.builtin.varnames', 'password')  }}"

(Both of the above solutions are documeted here).

Lastly, you can use the vars lookup to get the value of the variable:

- name: Show passwords
  ansible.builtin.debug:
    msg: "{{ item }}: {{ lookup('vars', item) }}"
  with_items: "{{ query('ansible.builtin.varnames', 'password')  }}"

Note that the vars lookup only returns "top-level variable names". If you actually want fact values, you may need to look them up via hostvars instead.