A Technical I.T./DevOps Blog
Problem scenario
You are running a playbook. A section is being skipped. When you use “-vvvv” to enhance the verbosity of the output messages, you see “Condition result was false”. How do you get the playbook section that is being skipped to execute?
Solution
The most likely cause is that you have a “when” statement that governs the clause of the playbook that is being skipped.
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Continue reading “How Do You Get an Ansible Playbook to Not Skip a Section?”
Problem scenario
You run an ansible-playbook command, but you get “ERROR! the field hosts is required but was not set”. What should you do?
Solution
Find the hyphens beneath the top “- name” stanza. Eliminate them. For example, if your playbook looks like this:
– name: Foobar
hosts: localhost
– vars:
goodone: “blahblah”
-tasks:
…
Make it look like this:
– name: Foobar
hosts: localhost
vars:
goodone: “blahblah”
tasks:
…
Now re-run it.
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Problem scenario
You try to run a playbook. But you get a message like this: ‘fatal: … “AnsibleUndefinedVariable” ‘hadoop_env’ is undefined’. What should you do?
Root cause: a variable you defined (e.g., in a playbook or role) is not getting assigned when you run the playbook.
Possible solution #1
Find the vars directory or create it.
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Continue reading “How Do You Troubleshoot the Ansible Error ‘”hadoop_env” is undefined’?”
Problem scenario
You want to run an Ansible playbook to push configuration changes down (e.g., transfer files to managed nodes). How do you do this?
Solution
Prerequisites
This assumes that you have set up Ansible. If you need directions for deploying an Ansible control server, see this posting. If you need directions for deploying a managed node after the central Ansible server has been set up,
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Problem scenario
How do you use the yum module in an Ansible playbook to install a yum package?
Solution
Prerequisites
This assumes you have installed Ansible and configured a managed node to work with it. If you need assistance with this, see this posting.
Procedures
1.
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Continue reading “How Do You Write an Ansible Playbook to Install a Yum Package?”
Problem scenario
You use a variable in an Ansible playbook. The value of the variable is surrounded by quotes and brackets. You may refer to it as punctuation [“”]. You want to assign the variable without the new symbols such as ‘[“”]’. How do you get just the value and no punctuation?
Solution
Do not use quotes or square brackets “[]” around the variable.
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Updated 8/1/21
Problem scenario
An Ansible playbook appears to run with no errors or explicit failures. But the playbook is not working as you expect. There is no message indicating what could be wrong. What should you do to troubleshoot it so the intended effect(s) will happen?
Tips and Possible Solutions in Nearly Random Order
1. When you run the ansible-playbook command,
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Problem scenario
You run an Ansible playbook with a variable. But you get this message: “ERROR! Syntax Error while loading YAML. expected , but found ”” (Ansible found blank single quotes or a double quote mark.)
How do you get the playbook to run?
Solution
Notice the “offending line” in the message. Remove the braces and possibly the quotes around the braces.
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Problem scenario
Ansible variables are not being picked up when the playbook runs. You may get no errors, or you may get errors like these:
“ERROR! Syntax Error while loading YAML…did not find expected key”
“ERROR! no action detected in task. This often indicates a misspelled module name, or incorrect module path”
What should you do?
Possible Solution #1
Are you using the -i flag when you are running the command to execute the playbook?
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Problem scenario
You want to refactor a playbook into a role. How do you do this?
Solution
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Continue reading “How Do You Transform an Ansible Playbook into a Role?”