Ansible Include Task Only If File Exists

Answer :

The with_first_found conditional can accomplish this without a stat or local_action. This conditional will go through a list of local files and execute the task with item set to the path of the first file that exists. Including skip: true on the with_first_found options will prevent it from failing if the file does not exist.

Example:

- hosts: localhost   connection: local   gather_facts: false    tasks:     - include: "{{ item }}"       with_first_found:         - files:             - /home/user/optional/file.yml           skip: true 

Thanks all for your help! I'm aswering my own question after finally trying all responses and my own question's code back in today's Ansible: ansible 2.0.1.0

My original code seems to work now, except the optional file I was looking was in my local machine, so I had to run stat through local_action and set become: no for that particular tasks, so ansible wouldn't attempt to do sudo in my local machine and error with: "sudo: a password is required\n"

- local_action: stat path=/home/user/optional/file.yml   register: optional_file   become: no - include: /home/user/optional/file.yml   when: optional_file.stat.exists 

I using something similar but for the file module and what did the trick for me is to check for the variable definition, try something like:

when: optional_file.stat.exists is defined and optional_file.stat.exists 

the task will run only when the variable exists.