when does ansible-playbook write to stdout?

[Jake Clarkson]

Hey guys,

Since using Ansible >= 1.3.0 I've noticed that when provisioning a Vagrant VM the output of `ansible-playbook` is not shown until it has finished (whether it be an error or a successful provision).

I've had a look in the Vagrant source code and in https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/blob/master/plugins/provisioners/ansible/provisioner.rb the following can be seen:

result = Vagrant::Util::Subprocess.execute(*command) do |type, data|
  if type == :stdout || type == :stderr
    @machine.env.ui.info(data, :new_line => false, :prefix => false)
  end
end

This looks to me like it's just redirecting stdout/err from `ansible-playbook` to the host machine's terminal. I have raised a ticket with Vagrant (https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/issues/2194).

If I run `ansible-playbook` by hand in the terminal I get 'realtime' feedback of task execution rather than solely at the end of the run, e.g.

ansible-playbook \

  ~/Development/playbook.yml \

  -i ~/Development/inventory \

  -u vagrant \

  --private-key=~/.vagrant.d/insecure_private_key

My question is, when does Ansible write to stdout? Did this change at all between 1.2.x -> 1.3?

Many thanks :-)

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[Jake Clarkson]

In order to replicate I have created a simple node.js script:

#!/usr/bin/env node

var spawn = require('child_process').spawn;

var args = [

  '/Users/jake/Development/playbook.yml',

  '-i', '/Users/jake/Development/inventory',

  '-u', 'vagrant',

  '--private-key', '/Users/jake/.vagrant.d/insecure_private_key'

];

var proc = spawn('ansible-playbook', args, {

  cwd: process.cwd()

});

proc.stdout.on('data', function(data) {

  console.log(data.toString());

});

proc.stderr.on('data', function(data) {

  console.error(data.toString());

});

[Michael DeHaan]

Yes, ansible obviously writes to stdout.

I'm pretty sure you have a problem with vagrant here, and this should be reported on the vagrant bug tracker.

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http://www.ansibleworks.com/

[Jake Clarkson]

Thanks for the reply.

I agree it looks like a Vagrant issue. It does seem strange that if I use Ansible 1.2.x with the same version of Vagrant (1.3.3) I get the output on a task-by-task basis.

With the node.js example would you expect that just to trigger the 'data' event of the stdout at the end or after each task?

[Dmitry Horbach]

Yes I noticed the same after upgrade to 1.3 Ansible.

 export PYTHONUNBUFFERED=1
This fixes the issue if ansible execution is wrapped with some other process

[Michael DeHaan]

So weird that I've never heard of that environment variable until now.

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[Jake Clarkson]

Thanks Dmitry, that solved the problem :-)

[Jake Clarkson]

Have submitted a PR to Vagrant for this:

https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/pull/2275

Thanks all for your help :-)

[Michael DeHaan]

Thanks very much!

We have lots of vagrant users so this will definitely continue to keep them happy.

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[Taylor Brown]

Thanks for this fix! I ran into this issue when running ansible-playbook as part of a shell provisioning script in Vagrant. In other words, Vagrant is just running a shell script, and the shell script is running "sudo ansible-playbook" in local mode. However, I just wanted to point out that in this case, the following doesn't work as I expected:

export PYTHONUNBUFFERED=1

sudo ansible-playbook /vagrant/provisioning/playbook.yml --connection=local -i "[database]127.0.0.1,"

Of course, I'm a Linux noobie, and it took me a while to realize I needed to do this instead:

sudo PYTHONUNBUFFERED=1 ansible-playbook ...

Or this:

sudo python -u `which ansible-playbook` ...

The "PYTHONUNBUFFERED" env variable didn't survive the call to sudo, which makes sense in hindsight. Anyway, in case anyone else is running into this instead of using Vagrant's built-in Ansible provisioner, I wanted to post the solution here since this thread is a likely place to stumble.

Taylor

[Michael DeHaan]

Did this ever get addressed in Vagrant?

[Jake Clarkson]

Yep, it was resolved in Vagrant 1.3.4.

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