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bignose
Asked: 2020-08-26 14:35:46 +0800 CST

Display Ansible playbook output properly formatted

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What configuration is needed to correctly format the standard stream output from tasks in an Ansible ansible-playbook run?

What I run ansible-playbook foo.yaml the output from tasks includes the standard stream (stdout, stderr) content. But the display of these is in a big JSON single-line blob, and not printed as the formatted lines that were sent to the stream.

TASK [Django: Collect media fixture files] ******************************************************************************
ok: [lorem]

TASK [Django: Create superuser] ******************************************************************************
fatal: [lorem]: FAILED! => {"changed": false, "cmd": "python3 -m django createsuperuser\n  --noinput\n  --username \"admin\"\n  --email \"[email protected]\"", "msg": "\n:stderr: CommandError: You must use --full_name with --noinput.\n", "path": "/var/local/dolor/virtualenv/rectory/venv.py3.7/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/games", "syspath": ["/tmp/ansible_django_manage_payload_uj9f3le8/ansible_django_manage_payload.zip", "/usr/lib/python37.zip", "/usr/lib/python3.7", "/usr/lib/python3.7/lib-dynload", "/usr/local/lib/python3.7/dist-packages", "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages"]}

What is causing this unwanted formatting of the output? How can I tell Ansible to always format the stream output correctly for display in the ansible-playbook output?

logging ansible

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Ansible defaults to a machine-readable JSON output, not suitable for human reading. But there are other “callback” modules available, some of which can format the stream output.

    • The misleadingly-named debug module is more suitable for human viewing.
    • Recently, the yaml module formats the stream output as a easy-to-read YAML document.

    So, using the ANSIBLE_STDOUT_CALLBACK environment variable:

    $ ANSIBLE_STDOUT_CALLBACK=yaml ansible-playbook ansible/deploy.yaml

    will change the formatting of stream output:

    […]
TASK [Django: Collect media fixture files] ******************************************************************************
ok: [lorem]

TASK [Django: Create superuser] ******************************************************************************
fatal: [lorem]: FAILED! => changed=false
  cmd: |-
    python3 -m django createsuperuser
      --noinput
      --username "admin"
      --email "[email protected]
  msg: |-
    stderr: |-
      CommandError: You must use --full_name with --noinput.
    path: "/var/local/dolor/virtualenv/rectory/venv.py3.7/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/games"
    syspath: 
    - /tmp/ansible_django_manage_payload_uj9f3le8/ansible_django_manage_payload.zip
    - /usr/lib/python37.zip
    - /usr/lib/python3.7
    - /usr/lib/python3.7/lib-dynload
    - /usr/local/lib/python3.7/dist-packages
    - /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages
    • 6