Playbook (Ansible) syntax error

Question

I am a complete n00b to Ansible (or any scripting language for that matter) and would appreciate some help with my syntax/indentation (?) problem.

This is my simple playbook, the goal is to create an instance in AWS and add it to a security group.

I am quite confused as to what the problem is as I am getting 2 different errors from different yaml checkers:

1) Yamllint tells me: "(): did not find expected key while parsing a block mapping at line 2 column 3 "

2) Swagger tells me: "YAML Syntax Error. Bad indentation of a sequence entry at line 6, column 3: - name: Create a security group ^" (Points to the second "- name")

Any help would be great~

Cheers~

---
- name: Provision an EC2 Instance and assign an SG
  hosts: local
  connection: local
  gather_facts: False
  - name: Create a security group
      local_action:
          module: ec2_group
          name: test_sg
          region: us-west-2
          rules:
            - proto: tcp
              type: ssh
              from_port: 22
              to_port: 22
              cidr_ip: 0.0.0.0/0
            - proto: tcp
              from_port: 80
              to_port: 80
              cidr_ip: 0.0.0.0/0
          rules_egress:
            - proto: all
              type: all
              cidr_ip: 0.0.0.0/0
  - name: Create new instance
        local_action: ec2
          group= test_sg
          instance_type= t1.micro
          image= ami-9ff7e8af
          wait= true
          region= us-west-2
          keypair= XXX-keypair
          count= 1
      register: ec2

Answer 1

In line 6 you're introducing a new item of a list (the dash symbol). But the yaml parser doesn't know what to do with the item. There are two approaches.

• Swagger considers it is part of the main list and it is at the same level as line 2. So it complains about bad indentation in line 6.

• Yamllint understand it's a sublist but it doesn't know what key to assign the sublist.

Most likely, yamllint is correct, and you've missed a key called tasks . Even with that bit fixed, you'll find there are other identations problems. Below I've pasted what I understand is the correct text (from a Yaml perspective)

---
- name: Provision an EC2 Instance and assign an SG
  hosts: local
  connection: local
  gather_facts: False
  tasks: 
    - name: Create a security group
      local_action:
          module: ec2_group
          name: test_sg
          region: us-west-2
          rules:
            - proto: tcp
              type: ssh
              from_port: 22
              to_port: 22
              cidr_ip: 0.0.0.0/0
            - proto: tcp
              from_port: 80
              to_port: 80
              cidr_ip: 0.0.0.0/0
          rules_egress:
            - proto: all
              type: all
              cidr_ip: 0.0.0.0/0
    - name: Create new instance
      local_action: ec2
          group= test_sg
          instance_type= t1.micro
          image= ami-9ff7e8af
          wait= true
          region= us-west-2
          keypair= XXX-keypair
          count= 1
      register: ec2