Do not restart service if it was just started?

[Kyle]

Newish to Ansible.

I'm setting up a playbook for Splunk and it works great, the only part I'm unsure of is how to prevent a restart after splunk had just started. The whole play and the handler is below.

So on initial installation, I'm just trying to prevent the following, which is needless:

TASK: [splunk | Start Splunk] *************************************************

changed: [host1]

NOTIFIED: [splunk | restart splunk] *******************************************

changed: [host1]

# config/roles/splunk/tasks/main.yml

- name: Evaluating forwarder package

  yum: name=splunkforwarder state=latest

  tags: splunk

- name: configure outputs.conf

  template:

    src=outputs.conf.j2 dest=/opt/splunkforwarder/etc/system/local/outputs.conf owner=splunk group=splunk mode=0644

  notify:

    - restart splunk

  tags: splunk

- name: configure inputs.conf

  template:

    src=linux.inputs.conf.j2 dest=/opt/splunkforwarder/etc/system/local/inputs.conf owner=splunk group=splunk mode=0644

  notify:

    - restart splunk

  tags: splunk

- name: Accept license and configure boot start

  command: /opt/splunkforwarder/bin/splunk enable boot-start -user splunk --accept-license creates=/etc/init.d/splunk

  tags: splunk

  

- name: Correct permissions on init script

  file: path=/etc/init.d/splunk mode=0755

  tags: splunk

  

- name: Correct permissions on splunk directory

  file: path=/opt/splunkforwarder state=directory owner=splunk group=splunk recurse=yes

  tags: splunk

  

- name: Start Splunk

  service: name=splunk state=started

  tags: splunk

And my handler looks like this:

#  config/roles/splunk/handlers/main.yml

- name: restart splunk

  service: name=splunk state=restarted

[Dan Vaida]

The template module ensures idempotence. So, if there is no diff between the files and the templates, the task should not return "changed", thus not invoking the handler. However, sometimes things may change on the server (i.e. permissions, ownership) because of various reasons. For that, you can use changed_when to rule out "false positives".

You could also simply remove the "Start Splunk" task and only rely on config files changes to trigger the restart of the service. This could make sense if you don't install the service through a package manager.