Are facts carried forward?

[Michael Dur]

We have many playbooks, and groups.

I notice when I do a full site run that at the beginning of the 'top level' playbooks, that is those referenced by site.yml, that facts are gathered each time.

I realize I can disable gathering facts for a given playbook.

Are facts that are previously gathered carried forward, allowing us to gather just once for a run?

Thanks!

-Michael

[Michael DeHaan]

Answered this exact same question here yesterday:

Facts are available throughout the playbook run, or longer, if fact caching is enabled.

http://docs.ansible.com/playbooks_variables.html#fact-caching

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[kesten broughton]

Fact-caching will eliminate the need for the following workaround, but if you are stuck in pre 1.8 ansible...

If you have a bunch of plays in a site.yml and are a big fan of --start-at-task like i am, then there is a problem if downstream plays also require gathered facts.

Having gather_facts: yes   for every play slows things down. 

 - hosts: all

   gather_facts: yes

 - hosts: group1           

   gather_facts: no      # faster not to gather_facts if we got them above

   roles: 

     - role-that-uses-facts

     

But then if you start-at-task on the group1 play you don't have the facts you need.

My solution was to have the first role always gather facts for normal runs.  

  - hosts: zoo

    gather_facts: "{{ zoo_facts | default('no')}}"

Then when debugging/developing i run with

ansible-playbook -i hosts site.yml --start-at-task="task in zoo role" -e "zoo_facts=yes"

So we can start mid run, and switch on gathering facts for that role, but normally only the first play will gather facts.

[Henry Finucane]

Are you aware of 'smart' fact gathering? I think this might ameliorate
your problems:

http://docs.ansible.com/intro_configuration.html#gathering

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| Henry Finucane
| "I hear aphorisms are popular"
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[Michael DeHaan]

Smart fact gathering won't rerun fact gathering on a host that has already gathered, but it will not gather hosts explicitly on hosts that have not been gathered.

So it's basically a performance tweak.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ansible-project/CAGYSzJ-K6D%2Ba1SeRKpTy2d27Z6J09QVGDPAhreu13NBB8LJEfQ%40mail.gmail.com.