Hi,
Is there a clean and efficient 'ansible' way by which the playbook
developer can gain more control over the formatting of information to be
put in front of the resource that executes the playbook?
I'm relatively new at developing with ansible, having developed only about
a half dozen playbooks that execute in a dev-ops like environment, where
the goal of my playbooks has been to validate configuration and ensure
requested customizations/configuration changes can be made safely and
consistently.
In some cases, the playbook encounters configuration drift or other
findings where it seems unwise to resolve the finding in an automated
manner and instead seems better to abort while highlighting the need for
manual review/remediation.
When the Play aborts it has a lot of detailed information about the problem
that needs to be communicated back to the resource who initiated the
Playbook as the focus of the manual review needed. To date I have been
struggling to format this in a suitable way for the resources to easily
relate to, which is surprising --- surely this level of reporting is a
fundamental tenet for computer automation?
I'm not looking for anything too sophisticated, just a way to output some
static text (ideally controlling indentation, line and paragraph
boundaries) and also merge in some output from previously executed commands
or dynamically created 'dict' / 'list' objects, such that escaped newlines
are expanded and reasonably complex findings from the execution can be
consumed in a way that is easy to follow.
While researching this topic I've seen similar questions raised in
different forms over many years but never really seen these adequately
addressed. I'm therefore aware of custom (and less efficient) ad-hoc
approaches that have been suggested and also about '
ANSIBLE_STDOUT_CALLBACK', but don't want to change formatting as globally
(I don't control the config and am not the only developer implementing
playbooks) or even on the command line.
In general I am happy enough with the formatting of task related output
and the formatting achieved for general calls to 'debug' (like how it
formats a 'dict' when using the 'var:' directive). The requirement here
seems just a corner case where having more control would be beneficial to
clearly set out a specific finding that is the basis for the Playbook
aborting and therefore needs to be easily understood so the operator is
clear on what needs to be reviewed further.
To accommodate this flexibility it seems surprising that the built in 'debug'
module doesn't have a number of modifiers so the developer can utilize
additional formatting when the need arises, perhaps something like:
debug:
expand_newlines: true
format_mask: "{{ Service: %s (pid: %d)\nConfig:\n%j\n",
service_name, service_pid, json_config }}"
In absence of any support for formatting more natively, in modules like '
debug', is there any way to control formatting when writing to a file
(perhaps building it over multiple tasks) and then getting ansible to just
cat the file to stdout at the very end, so that the output retains
formatting and doesn't get missed in with other formatting (perhaps via a
handler?).
Any ideas welcomed --- I've experimented a lot and researched a lot but am
surprised not to have achieved the limited additional formatting needed to
ensure findings can be presented in a way that is easily relatable.
Sorry for the long posting and thanks in advance for any input you might be
able to offer.
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