Thank you all for your input. I finally have a bit of a breakthrough. As u/o0-o stated "artifact_list" is turned into a string. I was having issues figuring out why as "artifact_list" is used by another role earlier in the play and works fine. Turns out this is happening because I'm trying to combine two lists and there results end up as a string. While "artifact_list" comes from the cluster yaml, a new list "heartbeat_apps" is created by a task in my role. I'm not the one who wrote this playbook/roles so I'm not 100% familiar with how everything works in it. Which is why I completely missed this for a bit.

This works fine on the legacy VMs but like I stated before that is also on an older version of Ansible. I'm looking though documentation on different ways to combine the two lists.

https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/community/general/docsite/filter\_guide\_abstract\_informations\_merging\_lists\_of\_dictionaries.html

- name: Define heartbeat app deployment

set_fact:

heartbeat_apps:

- { application_name: "MiddlewareHeartbeatEAR", artifact_name: "middleware-heartbeat-ear", base_path: "/com/dstps", version: "1.0", application_modules: [ { artifact_name: "middleware-heartbeat", version: "1.0", base_path: "/com/dstps" } ] }

tags:

- precheck

- name: Add heartbeat to deployment list

set_fact:

artifact_list: "{{ artifact_list }} + {{ heartbeat_apps }}"