What is the difference between `ansible_architecture` and `ansible_machine` on Ansible?

Question

I'm trying to find the architecture of the machine by using Ansible facts.

We can gather information about the machine by running ansible -m setup command, as described in the documentation: Discovering variables: facts and magic variables — Ansible Documentation.

But it seems that the ansible_architecture and ansible_machine are the same values. I'm not sure the difference between them. The example on the above documentation shows the following two values which have the same values:

    "ansible_architecture": "x86_64",
    "ansible_machine": "x86_64",

On my M1 MacBook, the result is the same like this:

shuuji3@momo mac-dev-playbook
> ansible -m setup localhost | egrep '_architecture|_machine'
        "ansible_architecture": "arm64",
        "ansible_machine": "arm64",

Can we use these values interchangeably? Or can they have other values in another case?

user_439790 · Answer

According to the code (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/devel/lib/ansible/module_utils/facts/system/platform.py) it's mostly always the same.

The value can differ on Solaris, AIX and OpenBSD.

I guess ansible_machine is supposed to be the machine architecture (value of platform.machine() https://docs.python.org/3/library/platform.html), while ansible_architecture is more the OS architecture?

What is the difference between `ansible_architecture` and `ansible_machine` on Ansible?

1 Answers