RFE: allow to "mock" variables

[cjeanner]

Hello World!

While trying to get my code square and clean, I'm facing a "nasty" issue: our code is usually running in CI, namely Zuul. Zuul provides some parameters directly to the env, allowing to consume a mighty zuul mapping.

Of course, since it comes from an external service, ansible-lint doesn't know about that parameter, and crashes with internal-error since the parameter isn't known:

bash-5.1# ansible-playbook -i localhost, --syntax-check ci/playbooks/content_provider/content_provider.yml
ERROR! 'zuul' is undefined. 'zuul' is undefined

A nice way to work around that specific issue would be to add a new configuration parameter, such as mock_parameters, in the same way we currently have the mock_roles and mock_modules.

We would then pass this to the ansible-lint configuration file:

[...]
mock_modules:
  - zuul_return
mock_parameters:
  - zuul

allowing then to get things working as expected.

WDYT?

[MarkusTeufelberger]

Do you mean facts or variables instead of parameter? I would assume that a parameter is something you are handing over to ansible-playbook on the command line for example...

[ssbarnea]

Have you considered making the change in such way that ansible loads this variables? You could use inventory for that and achieve the same effect without having to add a new feature to the linter.

[MarkusTeufelberger]

That's how I currently set variables that are required to be present in molecule for example. For syntax checks it might be a bit overkill or maybe not very portable, but then again it would also not be very portable to define facts within the .ansible-lint config file.