Unexpected Exception: name 'basestring' is not defined when invoking ansible2

Question:

I’m trying to execute ansible2 commnads…

When I do:

ansible-playbook -vvv -i my/inventory my/playbook.yml

I get:

Unexpected Exception: name ‘basestring’ is not defined
the full traceback was:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/bin/ansible-playbook", line 85, in <module>
    sys.exit(cli.run())
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.4/site-packages/ansible/cli/playbook.py", line 150, in run
    results = pbex.run()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.4/site-packages/ansible/executor/playbook_executor.py", line 87, in run
    self._tqm.load_callbacks()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.4/site-packages/ansible/executor/task_queue_manager.py", line 149, in load_callbacks
    elif isinstance(self._stdout_callback, basestring):
NameError: name 'basestring' is not defined

Here is ansible --version:

ansible 2.0.0.2
  config file = /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg
  configured module search path = Default w/o overrides

And here is python --version

Python 3.4.3
Asked By: code_monk

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Source

Answers:

Ansible below version 2.5 requires Python 2.6 or 2.7 on the control host: Control Node Requirements

basestring is no longer available in Python 3. From What’s New In Python 3.0:

The builtin basestring abstract type was removed. Use str instead. The str and bytes types don’t have functionality enough in common to warrant a shared base class. The 2to3 tool (see below) replaces every occurrence of basestring with str.

So the solution is to either upgrade Ansible or downgrade Python.

Answered By: udondan

basestring is not available in Python 3.:

This can be fixed for python 2.x and 3.x with the following:

try:
  basestring
except NameError:
  basestring = str
Answered By: Chris Laidler

I ran into this issue using Python 3 with Ansible and solved by forking the dopy project and installing dopy in my ansible script with:

name: git+https://github.com/eodgooch/[email protected]#egg=dopy.

If you are still getting errors be sure to change the version to 0.4.0 and remove any lingering dopy packages from your Python site-packages directory.

Also you could pip3 install git+https://github.com/eodgooch/[email protected]#egg=dopy instead of in your Ansible Task.

Answered By: eodgooch

Replace basestring with str. In 2.x basestring is there. but in 3.x the basestring has been replaced with “str”.

Answered By: Dila Gurung

The problem might be due to python version. In 2.x, basestring is there but in 3.x it has been replaced with “str”.

Answered By: Dila Gurung

Another possible solution is to install future via pip install future and import from past.builtins import basestring.

from past.builtins import basestring

Personally, I’m not crazy about this solution because:

  1. It requires installing another dependency.
  2. There are likely other backward compatibility issues mixing Python 3 and 2 code.
  3. It will only work in your code – you don’t want to modify Ansible source code.

I offer it only because it’s something I’ve used in the past to make my own code work in both Python 2 and 3.

Answered By: cycgrog

replace basestring with (str, bytes) and it should work perfectly

Answered By: Brian Kyanjo