Providing integer variables from command line (via --extra-vars) recognized as string

[ulucaydin]

This is for Ansible 2.X:
When I run a playbook via CLI and providing a such extra variable, node_number as integer:

ansible-playbook my_playbook.yml --extra-vars "node_number=10"
I have a array slice operation within a role of my to take a portion of the playbook:

- debug: msg="{{ item }}"
  with_items: `groups.mygroup[:node_number]`

Here is the error I receive:

ok: [localhost]
ERROR! an unexpected type error occurred. Error was slice indices must be integers or None or have an __index__ method

Interestingly, when I remove the variable from CLI and provide the same variable from group_vars/all/common.yml, it works:

---
node_number:10

[bcoca]

the key/val parser there does not try to do typing, YAML itself does do typing, if you pass as a json string it would also preserve type as the JSON parser also does typing, but to avoid any input problems you could just do this:
with_items: "{{groups.mygroup[:node_number|int]}}"

[jimi-c]

As @bcoca indicated above, if you want to pass in specific types as extra vars, you should use the ability to pass in JSON or YAML via extra args: http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/playbooks_variables.html#passing-variables-on-the-command-line

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