reduce task verbosity and improve ssh performance

[marcelgsteiger]

I'm using ansible for similar projects for quite some time now. Perhaps I could share some ideas that have proved useful in my daily work.

I usually make ansible less verbose (more user friendly) and significantly faster (by re-using the ssh connection once it has been established within a task).

My usual settings for ansible.cfg:

[defaults]
inventory = hosts
stdout_callback = selective
#stdout_callback = default
display_ok_hosts = true
display_skipped_hosts = false
show_task_path_on_failure = true

[ssh_connection]
pipelining = True
ssh_args = -o ControlMaster=auto -o ControlPersist=60s -oStrictHostKeyChecking=no -o PreferredAuthentications=publickey

NOTE: Normally I leave the inventory = entry out - I'm used to add a Makefile to my project that passes the inventory via environment variable.

stdout_callback = selective replaces successful steps in a task by a single dot by default. If this is undesirable, I add the print_action tag to override this, e.g. to show a positive [OK] message as in the following example on a raspberry pi:

- name: check if we have a AUTOBOOT partition
  shell:
    cmd: >
      blkid -o export /dev/{{ bootdev.stdout }}1 | grep -Fq 'LABEL_FATBOOT=AUTOBOOT'
  register: autoboot
  failed_when: autoboot.rc > 1

- assert:
    that: autoboot.rc == 0
    success_msg: "[OK] found AUTOBOOT partition"
    fail_msg: "[FAIL] missing AUTOBOOT partition at /dev/{{ bootdev.stdout }}1" 
  tags: [print_action]

Regards
Marcel