Not getting fact_caching to work

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1

Hi all,

Long time ansible cli user but fairly new to AWX.

I am trying to figure out how to enable fact caching, and verify it is enabled. I currently have set:

In the playbook running in the template:
gather_facts: True

In AWX: Settings → Jobs → EXTRA ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES:
“CACHE_PLUGIN_CONNECTION”: “/var/lib/awx/facts”,
“ANSIBLE_CACHE_PLUGIN”: “jsonfile”

But every time a job runs it seems to take a long time to run the setup module (and seems in fact to be running it on every host). Are there any other settings I’m missing? And I’ve looked in $CACHE_PLUGIN_CONNECTION for a tmp directory or one named ‘cache’ or any .json files that I would assume would be created but am not finding anything.

AWX 9.2.0
Ansible 2.9.3

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

2

I also tried per the documentation putting a copy of ansible.cfg in the project root directory with:

fact_caching = jsonfile
fact_caching_connection = ./facts

This same configuration works from ansible but not from AWX.

Does anyone have insight on this?

Thanks

3

We’ve got this to work on our instances of AWX (Ansible 2.9.7 running in AWX 11.2.0) by setting environment variables (under jobs/settings) as below;
{
“HOME”: “/var/lib/awx”,
“ANSIBLE_PYTHON_INTERPRETER”: “python”,
“ANSIBLE_JINJA2_EXTENSIONS”: “jinja2.ext.do,jinja2.ext.i18n”,
“ANSIBLE_GATHERING”: “smart”,
“ANSIBLE_CACHE_PLUGIN”: “jsonfile”,
“ANSIBLE_CACHE_PLUGIN_CONNECTION”: “/home/awx”

}

4

Thanks much for the reply Rod but that didn’t quite work out as expected. Of the ~400 nodes only three recorded facts as being gathered onto the controller node (weird). And even then the only fact put into each file was:

{

“discovered_interpreter_python”: “/usr/bin/python”

}

We run the ‘big’ jobs overnight so I don’t watch them run, and the logs are quite a bit to go through but when we have run subsets of the ‘big’ jobs I have seen the system almost running out of memory (another reason I want to get fact_cache working). I will spend some time looking at the awx_task logs and the system logs and see if I can correlate some kind of system resource shortage. In the meantime, any other suggestions? :wink:

Thanks again.

5

AWX fully implements the fact caching feature and doesn’t require that you set any ansible configs. If enabled for a job template and your playbook runs the setup module (gather_facts: true). Then, after the job finishes, AWX will take the state of the per-host facts and persist them to the database. You can view the facts through the inventory host browser.

6

Thank you Christopher, that helps. I do see the facts now browsing within the inventory. I’ve got to get out of my old way of ansible-playbook cli thinking I suppose. ;).