If you are using “–extra-vars” at runtime to override a boolean variable, then you should use the JSON syle (instead of key-value pairs) to avoid type conversion issues.
For example, if there is a boolean variable named “myflag” that is default to true in your playbook and you attempt to override it like below, it will not work as expected.
# this boolean override will probably work as expected ansible-playbook my-playbook.yml --extra-vars "myflag=false"
The problem is the value will be passed as the string “false”, which will not automatically be sensed as a Truthy/Falsy value. Ansible will only see that the string is non-empty and that equates to true.
This can be avoided by using the JSON version of extra-vars.
# this boolean override works
ansible-playbook my-playbook.yml --extra-vars '{"myflag": false}'
If you insist on using key-value pairs, then it would require you to provide an empty value, which evaluates to false.
# this empty value will evaluate to false my-playbook.yml --extra-vars "myflag="
Another way to avoid this issue is to use an explicit “bool” filter cast everywhere the value is used in your playbook.
- debug:
msg: "myflag is false when using explicit boolean conversion"
when: not myflag|bool
You can find a full example I wrote in github as playbook-pass-extra-vars.yml
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