check status of async job

Archives Ansible Project
1

I am trying to run async jobs with ‘poll=0’ (fire & forget) and then check the job status via async_status. However, I don’t know how to properly check for job completion.

Here’s my playbook snippet:

  • command: /bin/sleep 10
    async: 25
    poll: 0
    register: sleeper

  • async_status: jid={{ sleeper.ansible_job_id }}
    register: job_result
    until: job_result.finished
    retries: 10
    delay: 1

Of course, the ‘until: job_result.finished’ fails because the ‘finished’ attribute is NOT populated until the job has finished. I have tried doing ‘until: hasattr(job_result,‘finished’)’ as well, but this also fails.

How should I be doing this kind of thing?

Thanks.

2

If you fire and forget you can’t check status.

You should consider not doing fire-and-forget and setting a poll interval

3

Thanks, but my experience with adding the poll interval seems to make an async task into a blocking, synchronous task. The playbook does not proceed until the job is finished or the timeout is reached.

What I’d like to do is launch tasks A & B asynchronously so that they execute in parallel. Then I want the playbook to continue with task C only after tasks A & B have both finished.

Is this possible?

4

Yes, I’m aware that polling does that, it’s intentional.

There’s no way to poll a ‘fire and forget’ job unless you just have it touch a file when you are done.

There’s a do/until loop in 1.4 you could combine with the stat module if you wanted for that purpose.

5

No, it is not currently possible to use async in this manner. Please feel free to open a feature request for this on github.

Thanks!

6

Thank you both for the information. Thought maybe I was missing something.

7

May I suggest a simple code change here, for consideration by the group?

In the async_status module, always return the ‘finished’ attribute (with a 0 or 1 value) instead of doing so ONLY when the job is finished. This would make it trivial to perform the parallelization/waiting that today is not available, using the do…until mentioned in the original post. The code change to async_status would probably be as simple as changing line 84:

module.exit_json(results_file=log_path, ansible_job_id=jid, started=1, finished=0)

More general question: how would I check for the presence of an attribute on a result register?

8

Yep, open to patches if you’d like to add this and test to make sure it’s still operational/etc.

“More general question: how would I check for the presence of an attribute on a result register?”

Offhand, untested:

when: foo.rc is defined