CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ansible
sorin
sorin

Reputation: 170390

How to avoid having to skip fatal task errors with ansible?

When running ansible playbooks you do often encounter use-cases where a task (usually shell or command) is expected to return error codes.

So far the solution was to register the result and to add ignore_errors: true and to decide later if it was a real error or not.

Now, there is one issue with this: it will mess the logging as you will see red error like

fatal: ...
...ignoring

Is there a way to avoid these so we would not have fake errors in the logs?

Upvotes: 6

Views: 8803

Answers (2)

Konstantin Suvorov
Konstantin Suvorov

Reputation: 68239

failed_when and changed_when is to help you:

- shell: echo good | grep bad
  register: res
  failed_when: false
  changed_when: false

This will always be good and green despite failed shell command.
You can also define a complex failed_when statement based on registered variable.

Upvotes: 14

Bartosz Bilicki
Bartosz Bilicki

Reputation: 13235

The best way is https://stackoverflow.com/a/40430875/1849837 (use changed_when and failed_when). Note that it works from Ansible since 1.4.

For older Ansible version the only way I see (and use) is do not run potentially failing task at all. You may use conditions (when) for that.

First you need to check the condition and assign the result of check to the variable

- name: "check if condition is met"
  command: some condition that populates result
  register: result

- name: "some operation"
   command: operation that runs only if result is not failed.
  when: result|failed

This includes some boilerplate code (you need artificial step to test the condition) but I see no better alternatives. I believe that this is better than polluting the logs with fatal: ... ...ignoring.

Upvotes: -1

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