I recently moved from Text Wrangler to Sublime Text for editing YAML files for Ansible. Getting it set up right involves very little and now with Ansible syntax highlighting it offers a light weight editor for your plays. In this post I note down some of the steps to get it setup the way I like it.

In this article I look at a very simple example of how to convert complex variable structures to simple lists using Jinja2 filters within an Ansible task.

Working on a long Ansible play today - I was tripped up by a hidden unicode character inadvertently entered in to a YAML file - resulting in a UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position 0: ordinal not in range(128) slap in the face. Here is how to deal with that!