What is Task

Here is what a basic task looks like. As with most modules, the service module takes key=value arguments:

tasks:

  - name: make sure apache is running

    service: name=httpd state=started

The command and shell modules are the only modules that just take a list of arguments and don’t use the key=value form. This makes them work as simply as you would expect:

tasks:

  - name: enable selinux

    command: /sbin/setenforce 1

The command and shell module care about return codes, so if you have a command whose successful exit code is not zero, you may wish to do this:

tasks:

  - name: run this command and ignore the result

    shell: /usr/bin/somecommand || /bin/true

Or this:

tasks:

  - name: run this command and ignore the result

    shell: /usr/bin/somecommand

    ignore_errors: True

If the action line is getting too long for comfort you can break it on a space and indent any continuation lines:

tasks:

  - name: Copy ansible inventory file to client

    copy: src=/etc/ansible/hosts dest=/etc/ansible/hosts

            owner=root group=root mode=0644

Variables can be used in action lines. Suppose you defined a variable called vhost in the vars section, you could do this:

tasks:

  - name: create a virtual host file for {{ vhost }}

    template: src=somefile.j2 dest=/etc/httpd/conf.d/{{ vhost }}

To check the syntax of a playbook, use ansible-playbook with the --syntax-check flag. This will run the playbook file through the parser to ensure its included files, roles, etc. have no syntax problems.

Look at the bottom of the playbook execution for a summary of the nodes that were targeted and how they performed. General failures and fatal “unreachable” communication attempts are kept separate in the counts.

If you ever want to see detailed output from successful modules as well as unsuccessful ones, use the --verbose flag. This is available in Ansible 0.5 and later.