How to break from the loop in Ansible

Generally, it thought to be impossible. But if you really want to, you can.

The problem

To stop Ansible loop if one of the calls to the module returned changed. Basically, to write in Ansnible this:

for x in list_of_items:
    res = module(x)
    if res.changed:
       break

The problem is that there is no ‘break’ keyword or any other analogue in Ansible.

The solution

---
- hosts: localhost
  tasks:
    - file:
        path: '{{ item }}'
        state: directory
      register: res
      when: not (res.changed|d(false))
      loop: '{{ list_of_items }}'
  vars: 
    list_of_items:
      - /etc
      - /bin
      - example1
      - example2
      - example3

The trick here is that res.changed for registered task is changing on each iteration. There is res.results, but we are not care about it much.

If you run this script, it would make ‘no change’ for /etc and /bin, and will create example1 directory, and skip other examples

On a second run it would create example2, and skip the rest.