How to run Ansible playbooks only if there are no problems in the playbook?

Question

I have learned of the command ansible-playbook example.yml --check which can tell me if something in my playbook is problematic (as far as Ansible can recognize).

I think I should combine this command with ansible-playbook example.yml so to execute my playbook only if the former test listen no errors.

I thought of this but I'm not sure if it's correct:

ansible-playbook example.yml --check && ansible-playbook example.yml

I thought the && will ensure that only if the check went fine (no errors found) the second command (actual execution of the playbook) will occur.

Is that the case? If not, what's the correct way to ensure a playbook will be played if and only if it is errorless?

Answer 1

In my testing, ansible-playbook --syntax-check does set the exit code appropriately based on syntax errors in the playbook. You can take my word for it that the good-example and bad-example playbooks behave as indicated.

A good file:

$ ansible-playbook --syntax-check good-example.yaml
 [WARNING]: provided hosts list is empty, only localhost is available. Note that the implicit localhost does not match
'all'


playbook: good-example.yaml
$ echo $?
0

... and a broken file:

$ ansible-playbook --syntax-check bad-example.yaml
 [WARNING]: provided hosts list is empty, only localhost is available. Note that the implicit localhost does not match
'all'

ERROR! 'xhosts' is not a valid attribute for a Play

The error appears to have been in '/.../bad-example.yaml': line 2, column 3, but may
be elsewhere in the file depending on the exact syntax problem.

The offending line appears to be:

---
- xhosts: all
  ^ here

$ echo $?
4

So I believe you could do a syntax-check in the way you're suggesting:

ansible-playbook --syntax-check example.yml && ansible-playbook example.yml

... although it may be quieter to drop the output from the syntax checking portion:

ansible-playbook --syntax-check example.yml >/dev/null 2>&1 && ansible-playbook example.yml

---

Note: You could wrap that all in a function to save typing:

safe-ansible() {
  ansible-playbook --syntax-check "$@" > /dev/null 2>&1 &&
  ansible-playbook "$@"
}