Fail gracefully if no hosts match

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1

Hi All

I’ve got an Ansible playbook that I’m running against a custom inventory group I’ve created. The issue is that this group may or may not be empty. I only want Ansible to exit non-zero if it ran against a host (or hosts) and any of them failed (standard Ansible behavior), but I don’t want Ansible to exit non-zero if the group is empty (or if the group doesn’t exist).

The reason why I want it to exit 0 if no hosts match is that I’m running it from a CI system and exiting non-zero means the job failed, which is not true in the case of no hosts matching (it just means it had nothing to do).

Any suggestions?

  • Gonz
2

Running the playbook below with an empty group results in 0 exit code. What am I missing?

  • hosts: test99
    pre_tasks:
  • debug: var=play_hosts
    delegate_to: localhost

HTH,

-vlado

3

Ah, I should have mentioned that in my playbook I have a hosts line like:

hosts: group1,group2,group3

… and then I limit by this custom group I mentioned (which may be empty or not exist at all). That’s when the playbook fails… when the --limit doesn’t match any host at all.

You did, however, give me an idea. By making my hosts like something like:

hosts: group1,group2,group3,&{{ required | default(‘all’) }}

… I can provide the custom group as an extra variable and it works as I need it to. Thanks for replying!

  • Gonz