Do not restart service if it was just started?

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1

Newish to Ansible.

I’m setting up a playbook for Splunk and it works great, the only part I’m unsure of is how to prevent a restart after splunk had just started. The whole play and the handler is below.

So on initial installation, I’m just trying to prevent the following, which is needless:

TASK: [splunk | Start Splunk] *************************************************
changed: [host1]

NOTIFIED: [splunk | restart splunk] *******************************************
changed: [host1]

config/roles/splunk/tasks/main.yml

  • name: Evaluating forwarder package
    yum: name=splunkforwarder state=latest
    tags: splunk

  • name: configure outputs.conf
    template:
    src=outputs.conf.j2 dest=/opt/splunkforwarder/etc/system/local/outputs.conf owner=splunk group=splunk mode=0644
    notify:

  • restart splunk
    tags: splunk

  • name: configure inputs.conf
    template:
    src=linux.inputs.conf.j2 dest=/opt/splunkforwarder/etc/system/local/inputs.conf owner=splunk group=splunk mode=0644
    notify:

  • restart splunk
    tags: splunk

  • name: Accept license and configure boot start
    command: /opt/splunkforwarder/bin/splunk enable boot-start -user splunk --accept-license creates=/etc/init.d/splunk
    tags: splunk

  • name: Correct permissions on init script
    file: path=/etc/init.d/splunk mode=0755
    tags: splunk

  • name: Correct permissions on splunk directory
    file: path=/opt/splunkforwarder state=directory owner=splunk group=splunk recurse=yes
    tags: splunk

  • name: Start Splunk
    service: name=splunk state=started
    tags: splunk

And my handler looks like this:

config/roles/splunk/handlers/main.yml

  • name: restart splunk
    service: name=splunk state=restarted
2

The template module ensures idempotence. So, if there is no diff between the files and the templates, the task should not return “changed”, thus not invoking the handler. However, sometimes things may change on the server (i.e. permissions, ownership) because of various reasons. For that, you can use changed_when to rule out “false positives”.

You could also simply remove the “Start Splunk” task and only rely on config files changes to trigger the restart of the service. This could make sense if you don’t install the service through a package manager.