Writing an endless playbook strategy plugin

[Florian Dambrine]

Hey everyone,

I would like to have your input on that question.

I have a really special use case where I want to run an endless playbook (on localhost only). I basically want to implement an endless loop on my playbook. As we all know, looping over a set of tasks or blocks is not possible with a statement like while true, which will look like:

### role/tasks/main.yml
---

- include: run-in-loop.yml
  until: False

Right now looping over includes is doable by doing a with_ statement. What I trying to achieve right now would look like:

### role/tasks/main.yml
---

- include: run-in-loop.yml

  with_sequence: start=0 end=<+INFINITE>

  loop_control:

    loop_var: main_item

This might not be a good idea at all, as I have no idea how Ansible will consume resources on the server (Memory especially).

I can of course use a higher level command that will keep triggering my playbook in a loop, but I was actually thinking about implementing a custom strategy called endless for example. 

This strategy will be based on the classic linear strategy. 

Is that a really really bad idea or you think that could be doable?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

[Benjamin Redling]

On 11/16/2016 14:22, Florian Dambrine wrote:
> [...] I basically want to implement an endless loop on my
> playbook.
[...]

> I can of course use a higher level command that will keep triggering my
> playbook in a loop, but I was actually thinking about implementing a

> _custom strategy_ called *endless *for example.

I don't understand the "but": what do you *gain* by implementing your
own strategy apart from learning to implement your own custom strategy?

No (ana)cron(-alike) available?

Cheers,
Benjamin
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[Florian Dambrine]

Well in my case I wont even need a cron-alike tool... I just want to start the playbook once and keep it running all the time. Maybe something like supervisor could help me keeping that playbook running all the time.

[Brian Coca]

I would just setup a daemontools service or if using systemd a unit that continually restarts ansible-playbook every time it dies

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Brian Coca