Using hyphen in ansible

Question

I am learning Ansible but I am getting confused when to use hyphen and when not to use hyphen in playbook.

Answer 1

Hyphen - is used to specify list items

 my_list = ['foo', 'bar']

In Ansible you will specify this list items with hyphen:

my_list:

  - foo

  - bar

Inside a playbook you have a list of plays and inside each play you have a list of tasks. Since tasks are lists, each task item is started with a hyphen like this:

tasks:

  - task_1

  - task_2