# AWX Syntax error

**URL:** <https://forum.ansible.com/t/awx-syntax-error/38053>\
**Category:** AWX Project\
**Tags:** awx\
**Created:** [June 2, 2023, 3:47pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/awx-syntax-error/38053 "2023-06-02T15:47:48Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 5\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Jayson\_Paul](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/a9adbd/32.png) [@Jayson\_Paul](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Jayson_Paul)\
**Post date:** [June 2, 2023, 3:47pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/awx-syntax-error/38053/1 "2023-06-02T15:47:48Z")

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Hey all,

I’ve been debugging this weird issue with awx recently. It looks related to these issues but they contain no resolution and one pointed me here:

[https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/56543](https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/56543)  
[https://github.com/ansible/awx/issues/7453](https://github.com/ansible/awx/issues/7453)

When awx goes to spawn the playbook on the instance group container, it says this error message:

^\nSyntaxError: EOF while scanning triple-quoted string literal\ncommand terminated with exit code 1\n", “module\_stdout”: “”, “msg”: “MODULE FAILURE\nSee stdout/stderr for the exact error”, “rc”: 1}

The interesting part is that this occasionally works but most of the time fails with that error. I have scaled everything down to a single awx and am running the most basic playbook that just uses debug and has no credentials. Does anyone know where I can start to look into this?

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![AWX\_Project](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/eada6e/32.png) [@AWX\_Project](https://forum.ansible.com/u/AWX_Project)\
**Post date:** [June 2, 2023, 4:59pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/awx-syntax-error/38053/2 "2023-06-02T16:59:31Z")

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do you have more info about your setup? which k8s cluster are you on (k3s, eks, etc)? what version k8s and AWX do you have?

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Jayson\_Paul](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/a9adbd/32.png) [@Jayson\_Paul](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Jayson_Paul)\
**Post date:** [June 2, 2023, 5:08pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/awx-syntax-error/38053/3 "2023-06-02T17:08:25Z")

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I am on GKE v1.23.17-gke.1700. We are running awx 17.1.0.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Jayson\_Paul](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/a9adbd/32.png) [@Jayson\_Paul](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Jayson_Paul)\
**Post date:** [June 2, 2023, 5:11pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/awx-syntax-error/38053/4 "2023-06-02T17:11:57Z")

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Also to make it clear. It looks like this error ([https://github.com/ansible/awx/issues/7453](https://github.com/ansible/awx/issues/7453)), it fails on the same internal awx playbook, but on the task after the one dumped in there. The task if fails on is called `spawn the playbook`. The code for this is here: [https://github.com/ansible/awx/blob/17.1.0/awx/playbooks/run\_isolated.yml#L48-L50](https://github.com/ansible/awx/blob/17.1.0/awx/playbooks/run_isolated.yml#L48-L50)

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![AWX\_Project](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/eada6e/32.png) [@AWX\_Project](https://forum.ansible.com/u/AWX_Project)\
**Post date:** [June 2, 2023, 6:02pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/awx-syntax-error/38053/5 "2023-06-02T18:02:21Z")

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AWX 17.1.0 is our legacy docker installer that is no longer supported. The newer versions of AWX are deployed on k8s clusters via awx-operator (see [https://github.com/ansible/awx-operator](https://github.com/ansible/awx-operator))

Please try upgrading AWX to a supported version (latest is 22.3.0), and let us know if you still experience that syntax error. We haven’t seen users mention this bug, so my guess is that upgrading will resolve this for you.

AWX Team