I usually attach a debugger,
http://michaeldehaan.net/post/35403909347/tips-on-using-debuggers-with-ansible
or set a small template action to dump the contents of the
dictionary/variable whatever to a local file on my box.
It's easier to inspect it that way,
On Friday, December 19, 2014 3:50:09 PM UTC, Dario Bertini wrote:
>
> I've been bitten one too many times by the way that ansible interacts with
> jinja. I'd say its error handling is a little bit too lax, defaulting to
> return empty strings or similar things that then end up getting my
> playbooks to fail later down the line.
>
> To prevent that, I know that I can have a better look at the available
> vars and facts gathered with the setup module
>
> ansible -m setup
>
> but often I'd like to see how I can use these with jinja: I'd like to have
> a REPL for it (or failing that, a shorter feedback loop)
>
> debug tasks inside a playbook are not ideal also because I cannot use them
> to debug issues with templates used before tasks execution (e.g. to define
> a variable)
>
> I was thinking of simply using
>
> ansible -m debug -a "msg={{the_jinja_expression_I_want_to_test}}"
>
> but I realized that the output is not quite what I'd expect:
>
> ansible -m debug -a "msg={{hostvars[inventory_hostname]}}"
>
> for example returns
>
> kalivm | success >> {
> "msg":
> "{'ansible_ssh_host':"
>
>
> }
>
> and
>
> ansible -m debug -a "msg={{hostvars}}"
>
> prints
>
> kalivm | success >> {
> "msg":
> "{'kalivm':"
>
>
> }
>
> It seems to be a truncated json string, probably because not all the
> variables have yet been made available there in a simple ansible module
> invocation (they'd probably be available in a full playbook run)
>
> Is this known behavior? How do you usually handle these things?
>
>
>
>
> Thanks
>
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