Alter Ansible's output on debugging

- 428 words -

Who knew that ansible output could be actually readable? 💡

Yesterday I saw this post on lobste.rs showing how changing the environment variable ANSIBLE_STDOUT_CALLBACK to yaml helps improving the output of the ansible-playbook command. While I was happy to find a way to improve readability there were two things which didn't fit my needs:

First, the author uses a wrapper script to call ansible-playbook and I regularly call the command directly from the command line so I needed something directly available and transparent.
Secondly, the author exports the ANSIBLE_STDOUT_CALLBACK variable so if I want to get rid of the yaml formatting I need to change the variable manually again.

So I came up with a short solution to be added to one's .bash_aliases (or any prefered rc file holding your aliases):

alias ansible-playbook='ansiblePlaybookDebug'
function ansiblePlaybookDebug {
    export ANSIBLE_STDOUT_CALLBACK=default
    echo -n "$@" | grep -q -- "-v" && export ANSIBLE_STDOUT_CALLBACK=yaml

    'ansible-playbook' "$@"
}

The idea is to create a bash function ansiblePlaybookDebug which greps on its parameters and sets ANSIBLE_STDOUT_CALLBACK to yaml if -v was passed and otherwise keeps the variable to default. Then the parameters are passed to the original ansible-playbook command.

Then the alias ansible-playbook is created to replace the original command by the new function.

This way when you use ansible-playbook myplaybook.yml .... you get the same output as usual, but when things go down and you need you add one (or more) -v flags the ouput is nicely formatted and you get this:

fatal: [localhost]: FAILED! => changed=true
cmd: naught deploy --override-env true --cwd /home/ubuntu/project /home/ubuntu/project/shared/naught.ipc
delta: '0:00:00.045878'
end: '2021-03-17 09:12:31.012211'
msg: non-zero return code
rc: 1
start: '2021-03-17 09:12:30.966333'
stderr: |-
  unable to connect to ipc-file `/home/ubuntu/project/shared/naught.ipc`

  1. the ipc file specified is invalid, or
  2. the daemon process died unexpectedly
stderr_lines:
- unable to connect to ipc-file `/home/ubuntu/project/shared/naught.ipc`
- ''
- 1. the ipc file specified is invalid, or
- 2. the daemon process died unexpectedly
stdout: ''
stdout_lines: <omitted>

Instead of this:

fatal: [localhost]: FAILED! => {"changed": true, "cmd": "naught deploy --override-env true --cwd /home/ubuntu/project /home/ubuntu/project/shared/naught.ipc", "delta": "0:00:00.052263", "end": "2021-03-17 09:11:32.504379", "msg": "non-zero return code", "rc": 1, "start": "2021-03-17 09:11:32.452116", "stderr": "unable to connect to ipc-file `/home/ubuntu/project/shared/naught.ipc`\n\n1. the ipc file specified is invalid, or\n2. the daemon process died unexpectedly", "stderr_lines": ["unable to connect to ipc-file `/home/ubuntu/project/shared/naught.ipc`", "", "1. the ipc file specified is invalid, or", "2. the daemon process died unexpectedly"], "stdout": "", "stdout_lines": []}

This also has the advantage of letting you alternating between -v and no debug calls with the appropriate formatting and it also works from a wrapper script.

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