Looking for Ansible equivalent method to yml Anchors, Aliases, when using include file

Question

Using Ansible with the aci_rest module, requires the authentication parameters (hostname, username, password, method, validate_certs) to be defined in every task e.g.

aci_rest:
  hostname: "{{ inventory_hostname }}"
  username: "{{ apic_username }}"
  password: "{{ apic_password }}"
  method: post
  validate_certs: no
  path: /api/node/mo/uni/controller/nodeidentpol.json
  method: post
  ...etc

The YML Anchors, Aliases syntax works perfectly fine within one file.

- aci_rest:
    <<: *aci_login
    path: /api/node/mo/uni/controller/nodeidentpol.json
    method: post
    ...etc

However not when variables and tasks are in different files using any of these functions:

vars_files:
include_tasks:
include_vars:

The full playbook has 70+ tasks with the authentication info repeated every time. I have not been able to find a way to not use repeat code. Is there a way to do this similar to yml alias?

Answer 1

There is module_defaults playbook-level option:

- hosts: localhost
  module_defaults:
    file:
      owner: root
      group: root
      mode: 0755
  tasks:
    - file:
        state: touch
        path: /tmp/file1
    - file:
        state: touch
        path: /tmp/file2