CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ansible
Carson Cole
Carson Cole

Reputation: 4461

Do Ansible modules run locally or on the remote host?

I am running an Ansible playbook that uses the route53 module and getting an error saying I need 'boto' installed:

TASK [dns : Retrieve DNS record] ***********************************************
fatal: [10.13.25.12]: FAILED! => {"changed": false, "failed": true, "msg": "boto required for this module"}

I do have 'boto' installed on my Ansible machine.

Question: Do all Ansible modules cited in Playbook tasks actually run on the remote host machine?

I have added tasks that install 'python-pip' and 'boto', but it seems that boto should be running on my Ansible server. I feel like I've done something wrong here.

Here are my tasks for installing pip/boto on my remote host machine which do result in no more errors in the running of the route53 module:

- name: Install Pip
  apt: name=python-pip state=present

- name: Install boto
  pip: name=boto

Upvotes: 4

Views: 5424

Answers (2)

ydaetskcoR
ydaetskcoR

Reputation: 56997

Udondan's answer covers the how some modules have a local component as well as remote actions but for general use all you need to know is that for these modules that interact with a remote service (such as all of the cloud modules) rather than a remote host you might be best off running these as a local action to force Ansible to run the module locally rather than on the remote host that the playbook/role is currently targeting.

You can do this easily by using local_action in your task definition like this:

- name: Retrieve DNS record
  local_action:
    module: route53_facts
    query: record_sets
    hosted_zone_id: '{{ route53_hosted_zone_id }}'
    ...
  register: dns_records

Upvotes: 7

udondan
udondan

Reputation: 60089

Modules are executed remotely. Though this only is half of the truth. Many modules bring action plugins with them. These action plugins run locally and invoke their module component (or other modules) later.

For instance the template module actually is an action plugin which renders the template locally and then invokes the copy module.

Unfortunately you can not know what is a module and what is an action plugin without looking at the source. The documentation does not even mention action plugins do exists...

You can find all core action plugins here. As you can see there is no route53 plugin so this really is a module and therefore runs remotely.

Why you still get this error after installing boto I can't explain. I can only suggest you look at the source and try to reproduce the problem without Ansible.

These few import statements do not run without errors on the remote machine.

import boto
import boto.ec2
from boto import route53
from boto.route53 import Route53Connection
from boto.route53.record import Record, ResourceRecordSets
from boto.route53.status import Status

Upvotes: 10

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