Installing Xfce on CentOS 7 via ansible yum

Question

I have a Centos 7 machine freshly started from the centos/7 vagrant base box. I provision the box via ansible but the following does not work:

- name: Install xfce
  yum:
    name: "@^Xfce"
    state: present
    enablerepo: "epel"

The error is:

TASK [desktop : Install xfce] ************************************************** fatal: [xxx]: FAILED! => {"changed": false, "changes": {"installed": ["@^Xfce"]}, "msg": "Error: Nothing to do\n", "rc": 1, "results": ["Loaded plugins: fastestmirror\nLoading mirror speeds from cached hostfile\n * base: mirror.ratiokontakt.de\n * epel: mirror.de.leaseweb.net\n * extras: centos.schlundtech.de\n * updates: centos.schlundtech.de\nGroup Xfce does not exist.\n"]}

Yet, running the following command from within the machine works:

sudo yum --enablerepo=epel -y groups install "Xfce"

What am I doing wrong?

larsks larsks · Accepted Answer · 2020-01-03T14:29:24

According to the yum module documentation:

Yum itself has two types of groups. “Package groups” are specified in the rpm itself while “environment groups” are specified in a separate file (usually by the distribution). Unfortunately, this division becomes apparent to ansible users because ansible needs to operate on the group of packages in a single transaction and yum requires groups to be specified in different ways when used in that way. Package groups are specified as “@development-tools” and environment groups are “@^gnome-desktop-environment”. Use the “yum group list hidden ids” command to see which category of group the group you want to install falls into.

You're specifying your grouop as @^Xfce, which is the syntax for an "environment group", but if you look at the output of yum group list hidden ids there is no "Xfce" environment group. There is a package group by that name, and this playbook seems to install it successfully:

---
- hosts: localhost
  gather_facts: false
  tasks:
    - name: install xfce
      yum:
        name: "@Xfce"
        state: "present"
        enablerepo: "epel"

Installing Xfce on CentOS 7 via ansible yum

1 Answers