ansible-lint failing 1 schema[playbook] basic core

[jpatallah]

versions:
ansible-lint 6.16.0

My playbook has the following format:

---
- name: <description>
  hosts: all

  vars_files:
    - group_vars/file1.yml
    - group_vars/file2.yml
    - group_vars/file3.yml
    - group_vars/file4.yml
    - group_vars/file5.yml
    - group_vars/file6.yml

  vars:
    - ansible_connection: ssh
    - ansible_shell_type: powershell

  roles:
    - role: <role_name>

I am getting the following error

schema[playbook]: ...is not valid under any of the given schemas
site.yml:1  Returned errors will not include exact line numbers, but they will mention
the schema name being used as a tag, like ``schema[playbook]``,

any help would be appreciated

[ssbarnea]

This is how python-jsonschema reports errors, we do not have much control over the effective errors but you are more than welcomed to improve the schema validator at https://github.com/python-jsonschema/jsonschema

I was able to spot the root cause of the validation error as being passing a list of dictionaries to vars: instead of a dictionary.

  vars: # <-- linter would choke on this, but ansible-core accepts
    - foo: ssh
    - bar: powershell

Before working on a fix, we need to ensure that there is a valid use-case for passing a list of dictionaries instead of a dictionary. If we do not have, we will not allow it, even if ansible does.

I did not see any example on ansible documentation that is using the list-of-dictionaries...

[ssbarnea]

We got the answer, ansible-core 2.15 already deprecated passing lists-of-dicts, so our schema is correct and you need to switch to using a dictionary.

We are also investigating ways to improve the messaging for this but it is tricky due to the way the library doing the validation works.