Error saying One or more undefined variables ansible facts is undefined

Question

I have this command that lists all the ansible facts:

ansible localhost -m setup

and it listed all the facts of my system. But when I tried to filter them out, i ended up getting the following error:

ansible localhost -a "echo {{ ansible_facts.ansible_date_time.date }}"
localhost | FAILED => One or more undefined variables: 'ansible_facts' is undefined

Why is this happening when the fact or variable already exists?

Answer 1

The command you've executed basically means run the setup against the localhost and hence gives you the output but when you run the echo command, it doesnt run the above command and hence has nothing to echo. 

You can create a play book that runs the setup command and stores the facts somewhere and then you can easily echo it.

The playbook would look something like this:

- hosts: localhost
  tasks:
      - debug: var=ansible_date_time

      - debug: msg="the current date is {{ ansible_date_time.date }}"