"META: ran handlers" informational message. What is it for?

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1

With the latest Ansible update (2.3) I noticed that whenever I run a playbook with -vv the informational message “META: ran handlers” comes.

For example

`
PLAYBOOK: yolo.yml *************************************************************************
1 plays in yolo.yml

PLAY [localhost] ********************************************************************************
META: ran handlers

TASK [some task] ***************************************************
task path:/ansible/playbooks/yolo.yml:7
ok: [localhost] => {some output}
META: ran handlers
META: ran handlers

PLAY RECAP **************************************************************************************
localhost : ok=1 changed=0 unreachable=0 failed=0
`

I understand that something was changed in 2.3 and this message appears (I haven’t noticed it before with 2.2), but what that actually means? In my playbook I call no handler, but this message seems to appear everytime.

Thanks.

2

It always 'happened' we just didn't display this, it is a new message
for that verbosity level.

The 'run handlers' always gets executed, which can be a noop if there
have been no handlers notified.

3

Thanks for the fast reply Brian. I find it to be a little bit too much information for this verbosity level, but oh well…

I have another short question if you could help me or point me to the documentation, because I couldn’t find anything. If you see in my example the ran handler process seems to be called 3 times. I knew that for sure the handlers are called after each play but it seems that they are called more often. Do you know exactly when? I guess that’s the reason that I see 3 times the “META: ran handlers” message.

4

They run after EACH section of a play (pre_tasks, roles, tasks, post_tasks).