Cannot get log_plays callback to work

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1

To preface; I apologize for asking what is probably a very simple question, but no matter what I try, it just doesn’t work.

I want to collect the output of an Ansible run in a Gitlab pipeline, format it, and send an e-mail with the results - preferably without additional software (like ARA). I came across the log_plays callback plugin and thought it to be exactly the thing that I needed for that first step. However, I cannot seem to get it to work, and I don’t know what I’m missing.

I have the community.general collection installed through ansible-galaxy install -r requirements.yml with the following requirements file:

---
collections:
  - name: community.general
    version: "13.5.0"
    source: https://galaxy.ansible.com

I have enabled the callback plugin in ansible.cfg:

[defaults]
callbacks_enabled = community.general.log_plays

[callback_log_plays]
log_folder = /tmp/log/ansible_hosts

I cannot find any examples of people explicitly enabling the callback or running it in a dedicated job or the like, so as far as I’m aware, it should generate the log files. However, when I check my submitted directory, it is empty. I have also checked the directory above it in case it treats the directory as a file to write to and the default /var/log/ansible/hosts directory in case it ignores it, but all of them were empty. My community general collection version is 13.5.0, Ansible version is 2.16.19. I didn’t get any notification that those were incompatible, but perhaps that is the issue.

Does anyone here know what I might be missing, or what I could investigate to help debug this further? Any help or tips are much appreciated!

2

It works for me with 2.21. See callback community.general.log_plays.

3

One thing worth checking first: whether the ansible.cfg you edited is actually the one being read in your GitLab job (ansible-config dump --only-changed in the pipeline shows the effective config). The log_plays plugin normally creates its log folder on startup (makedirs_safe in the plugin source), so which folders exist or get created can hint at which config took effect; just note a missing custom folder can also mean the path resolved differently, for example via ANSIBLE_LOG_FOLDER or an ini typo falling back to the default /var/log/ansible/hosts. ansible-doc -t callback community.general.log_plays is a decent smoke test that the plugin is discoverable, though it does not prove it is enabled at runtime. One more hypothesis: the community.general 13.x series declares requires_ansible >= 2.18 in its published meta/runtime.yml (your installed copy carries the same file) while you are on core 2.16, so that combination is not officially supported. If the callback errors during a run Ansible only prints a warning, so the start of the job log is worth a scan.

Assisted-by: LLM (drafting, source lookup)

4

ansible-config has a dump option (very useful with --only-changed flag) and a verify option, both should help ensure your configuration is what you expect.