How do I see stdout for ansible-playbook commands? -v only shows ansible output, not the individual commands. It would be great if I could figure out how to do this immediately, so if something fails or hangs I can see why.
e.g.
- name: print to stdout action: command echo "hello" would print
TASK: [print variable] ******************************************************** hello I think you can register the result to a variable, then print with debug.
- name: print to stdout command: echo "hello" register: hello - debug: msg="{{ hello.stdout }}" - debug: msg="{{ hello.stderr }}" 
- debug: var=hello. Sometimes this is more helpful for multiline output or Ansible module output (rather than command/shell output). shell: java -version 2>&1 register module, or whatever it is doesn't produce objects that have the stdout or stderr variable set.... so it's really bad that we don't just get the output by default :| async to force a timeout. Then you should be prompted something is wrong and see the previous output. Instead of stdout I would suggest using stdout_lines. For multiline output this is much nicer, e.g.
- hosts: all tasks: - name: Run ls.sh and output "ls /" script: ls.sh register: out - debug: var=out.stdout_lines gives
TASK: [debug var=out.stdout_lines] ******************************************** ok: [local] => { "var": { "out.stdout_lines": [ "total 61", "lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 Feb 15 2015 bin -> usr/bin", "drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 1024 Aug 24 22:08 boot", "drwxr-xr-x 22 root root 3580 Sep 8 18:41 dev", [...] "drwxr-xr-x 9 root root 4096 Aug 25 19:14 usr", "drwxr-xr-x 13 root root 4096 Feb 25 2015 var" ] } } Regarding real time output for debugging purposes there is a closed bug report https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/3887#issuecomment-54672569 discussing the reasons why this is not possible and will not be implemented.
command instead of script on the new versions of Ansible. register: out I'm appropriating that for all my taks. I found using the minimal stdout_callback with ansible-playbook gave similar output to using ad-hoc ansible.
In your ansible.cfg (Note that I'm on OS X so modify the callback_plugins path to suit your install)
stdout_callback = minimal callback_plugins = /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/ansible/plugins/callback So that a task such as this
--- - hosts: example tasks: - name: Say hi command: echo "hi ..." Gives output like this, like an ad-hoc command would
example | SUCCESS | rc=0 >> hi ... I'm using ansible-playbook 2.2.1.0
out would serve to minimise pollution. If you really want to watch the output in realtime, there is a hacky way around it, at least for the ansible shell module.
In whatever shell script wraps your call to ansible, touch and tail a log file in a background job. Then redirect the ansible shell command's output to append to that log file. You need to make sure you kill the background tail job after ansible finishes, or it will be left dangling.
For example, in a bash script that calls ansible:
set -m touch /tmp/debug.log && tail -f /tmp/debug.log & ansible-playbook ... call playbook here kill %1 # ensure the background tail job is stopped Then in some ansible role:
- name: Run a script and print stdout/stderr shell: bash -c "/run/something.sh 2>&1 >> /tmp/debug.log" I've found that just killing a stuck process on the remote via ssh gives back the stdout. I find thats shorter than writing workarounds that won't be used in the final playbook anyways:
kill -9 PID
Another way to get stdout of a command is to add more verbosity with -vvv. You don't have to write debug tasks, and it gives you good and viewable (JSON on multiple lines) output for everything. The only downside is that it speaks a lot (ssh log in, privilege escalation, ...).
-vv is enough to see stderr of ansible command actions.