Installing Xfce on CentOS 7 via ansible yum - ssh

Question

I have a Centos 7 machine freshly started from the centos/7 vagrant base box. I provision the box via ansible but the following does not work:
- name: Install xfce
yum:
name: "#^Xfce"
state: present
enablerepo: "epel"
The error is:
TASK [desktop : Install xfce]
************************************************** fatal: [xxx]: FAILED! => {"changed": false,
"changes": {"installed": ["#^Xfce"]}, "msg": "Error: Nothing to do\n",
"rc": 1, "results": ["Loaded plugins: fastestmirror\nLoading mirror
speeds from cached hostfile\n * base: mirror.ratiokontakt.de\n * epel:
mirror.de.leaseweb.net\n * extras: centos.schlundtech.de\n * updates:
centos.schlundtech.de\nGroup Xfce does not exist.\n"]}
Yet, running the following command from within the machine works:
sudo yum --enablerepo=epel -y groups install "Xfce"
What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

According to the yum module documentation:
Yum itself has two types of groups. “Package groups” are specified in the rpm itself while “environment groups” are specified in a separate file (usually by the distribution). Unfortunately, this division becomes apparent to ansible users because ansible needs to operate on the group of packages in a single transaction and yum requires groups to be specified in different ways when used in that way. Package groups are specified as “#development-tools” and environment groups are “#^gnome-desktop-environment”. Use the “yum group list hidden ids” command to see which category of group the group you want to install falls into.
You're specifying your grouop as #^Xfce, which is the syntax for an "environment group", but if you look at the output of yum group list hidden ids there is no "Xfce" environment group. There is a package group by that name, and this playbook seems to install it successfully:
---
- hosts: localhost
gather_facts: false
tasks:
- name: install xfce
yum:
name: "#Xfce"
state: "present"
enablerepo: "epel"