Unexpected behavior with cron

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1

Hey folks,
we recently performed an Upgrade of Ansible, or to be more specific an upgrade of AWX.
We went from AWX 17 to AWX 19.2.0 which also updated the Ansible version

After the Upgrade we get the following fatal error for every job about configuring cron:
“Will not manage /etc/crontab via cron_file, see documentation.”

This is a configuration we get the error with:

  • name: Remove specific cronjob
    ansible.builtin.cron:
    name: “specific cronjob”
    user: “root”
    cron_file: “/etc/crontab”
    job: “some command &>/dev/null”
    state: absent

We checked the documentation but our configuration seems to be okay, also it worked in the previous version.
Has anyone experienced this or has a guess what’s going on?

Regards
Michael

2

You appear to be running the devel version of ansible-core, the unreleased 2.12. That change has not been included in a published version yet.

So the docs will appear at https://docs.ansible.com/ansible-core/devel/collections/ansible/builtin/cron_module.html

The documentation reads:

The assumption is that this file is exclusively managed by the module, do not use if the file contains multiple entries, NEVER use for /etc/crontab

This change was made in https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/73591 to resolve https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/37355