How to get logs/details of ansible-playbook module executions

ansiblelogging

Say I execute the following.

$ cat test.sh
#!/bin/bash
echo Hello World
exit 0

$ cat Hello.yml
---

- hosts: MyTestHost
  tasks:
  - name: Hello yourself
    script: test.sh


$ ansible-playbook  Hello.yml

PLAY [MyTestHost] ****************************************************************

GATHERING FACTS ***************************************************************
ok: [MyTestHost]

TASK: [Hello yourself] ********************************************************
ok: [MyTestHost]

PLAY RECAP ********************************************************************
MyTestHost                    : ok=2    changed=0    unreachable=0    failed=0

$

I know for sure that it was successful.

Where/how do I see the "Hello World" echo'ed/printed by my script on the remote host (MyTestHost)? Or the return/exit code of script?

My research shows me it would be possible to write a plugin to intercept module execution callbacks or something on those lines and write a log file. I would prefer to not waste my time with that.

E.g. something like the stdout in below (note that I'm running ansible and not ansible-playbook):

$ ansible plabb54 -i /project/plab/svn/plab-maintenance/ansible/plab_hosts.txt -m script -a ./test.sh
plabb54 | success >> {
    "rc": 0,
    "stderr": "",
    "stdout": "Hello World\n"
}

$

Best Answer

If you pass the -v flag to ansible-playbook on the command line, you'll see the stdout and stderr for each task executed:

$ ansible-playbook -v playbook.yaml

Ansible also has built-in support for logging. Add the following lines to your ansible configuration file:

[defaults] 
log_path=/path/to/logfile

Ansible will look in several places for the config file:

  • ansible.cfg in the current directory where you ran ansible-playbook
  • ~/.ansible.cfg
  • /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg
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