Tips for Ansible Playbook Development

[heathdbrown]

Read an article that covered some items on performing debugging tasks in Ansible.

https://zwischenzugs.com/2021/08/27/five-ansible-techniques-i-wish-id-known-earlier/amp/

1. Use --step to get to a task faster
2. Use inline logging in playbooks for variables
3. Use ansible-console for interacting with modules
4. Use ansible-lint to review playbooks
5. Interact with the ansible debugger on failure and python

[heathdbrown]

Issue with testing ansible-console

When testing out the ansible-console I ran into the following issues:

• When running ansible-core 2.11.4 and ansible 4.44 missing import statements for
  • readline - solved by: pipenv install gnureadline
  • keysm - solved: pipenv install gnureadline

    Traceback (most recent call last):
       File "/home/BrownHD/.local/share/virtualenvs/thousandeyes-agent-config-O4qroPUg/bin/ansible-console", line 104, in <module>
       mycli = getattr(__import__("ansible.cli.%s" % sub, fromlist=[myclass]), myclass)
       File "/home/BrownHD/.local/share/virtualenvs/thousandeyes-agent-config-O4qroPUg/lib/python3.8/site-packages/ansible/cli/console.py", line 12, in <module>
       import readline
       File "/home/BrownHD/.local/share/virtualenvs/thousandeyes-agent-config-O4qroPUg/lib/python3.8/site-packages/readline.py", line 6, in <module>
      from pyreadline.rlmain import Readline
      File "/home/BrownHD/.local/share/virtualenvs/thousandeyes-agent-config-O4qroPUg/lib/python3.8/site-packages/pyreadline/__init__.py", line 12, in <module>
     from . import logger, clipboard, lineeditor, modes, console
    File "/home/BrownHD/.local/share/virtualenvs/thousandeyes-agent-config-O4qroPUg/lib/python3.8/site-packages/pyreadline/clipboard/__init__.py", line 13, in <module>
    from .win32_clipboard import GetClipboardText, SetClipboardText
    File "/home/BrownHD/.local/share/virtualenvs/thousandeyes-agent-config-O4qroPUg/lib/python3.8/site-packages/pyreadline/clipboard/win32_clipboard.py", line 39, in <module>
    from pyreadline.keysyms.winconstants import CF_UNICODETEXT, GHND
    File "/home/BrownHD/.local/share/virtualenvs/thousandeyes-agent-config-O4qroPUg/lib/python3.8/site-packages/pyreadline/keysyms/__init__.py", line 23, in <module>
    raise ImportError("Could not import keysym for local pythonversion", x)
    NameError: name 'x' is not defined

$pip list | grep ansible
ansible      4.4.0
ansible-core 2.11.4

$python --version
Python 3.8.10

Summary

• in Python3.8 there is a standard library called readline and there was/is a 3rd party library from pypi that was named the same thing but got renamed to "gnureadline" to NOT overlap with the standard library. Moving to this package got this to work properly.

Links

• https://docs.python.org/3.8/library/readline.html
• https://pypi.org/project/readline/
• https://pypi.org/project/gnureadline/

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