Behaviour of lookup in standalone playbook vs called playbook

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1

I have playbook that, when run by itself, looks up various values on the ansible host (e.g. the repository version of a roles directory) and writes them to a log on the ansible target.

The idea being keeping a log of who ran what versions of what playbooks from where. It’s the kind of info you hope to never need but can be invaluable if you do.

Anyway; here’s a snippet.

…
AnsibleGit: “{{ lookup(‘pipe’, ‘git log | head -1’) }}”

…

  • shell: echo “{{ EpochTime }} git {{ AnsibleGit }}” >> {{ Log }}

When I include the playbook as one playbook among many in setting up a server (as opposed to running it standalone) the lookups run on
the target rather than the host.

I can make something that gets that information by other means but I’d rather use lookup if I can.

Any ideas how to get lookup to always run on the host?

-david

2

lookups always run on the machine that executes the ansible-playbook
program (master), not sure what you mean by host or target.

The only way to run something other than on the master is through a
task. A lookup can query an API or some other remote resource (uri
lookup) but it runs on the master and the master must have access to
that remote resource.