Install a group of rpms with yum

If you want to install a group of rpms, for example doing the equivalent of:-

$ yum groupinstall 'Development tools'

then you need to specify the group to the yum module, preceding the group name with an @

However, in this case the groupname has a space in it, which makes it difficult to feed into the module without upsetting the parser. To work around this find the short name of the module:-

$ yum grouplist -v |fgrep 'Development tools'
  Development tools (development)

and use that, so either

action: yum name='@development' state=latest

or

action: yum name=$item state=latest
with_items:
  - '@development'