[FR] Support Ansible's `pause` module's interactive prompting

[huyz]

Following up on the discussion at https://github.com/xavierog/moulti/discussions/6#discussioncomment-10094741 :

I have some Ansible playbooks that won't run properly because of interactive prompts from the builtin Ansible module pause.

Example:

- name: Prompt for ssh password if necessary
  when: ansible_password is undefined
  block:
    - name: PAUSE | Conditionally prompt for ssh password
      ansible.builtin.pause:
        prompt: "Password for {{ ansible_user | d('') }}@{{ ansible_host | d('unknown') }}"
        echo: false
      register: password_prompt
      no_log: true

    - name: SET_FACT | Set ansible_password
      ansible.builtin.set_fact:
        ansible_password: "{{ password_prompt.user_input }}"
      no_log: true

The problem I get is:

ok: [mac] => {"ansible_facts": {"password_prompt": null}, "changed": false}                                                                                                                                                                                                  
    [WARNING]: Not waiting for response to prompt as stdin is not interactive   

This is separate from supporting interactivity for Ansible's vars_prompt feature (support for which was added in v1.13.0)

[xavierog]

Technical notes: under the hood, supporting the pause module implies to support Display.prompt_until, a method that takes 5 arguments:

• msg (str)
• private (bool)
• seconds: (int|None)
• interrupt_input: (bytes|None)
• complete_input: (bytes|None)

The first three arguments are already ok in my working directory. interrupt_input and complete_input were designed with a tty in mind and translating them to a TUI requires some care:

• interrupt_input could become an "Interrupt" push-button, a suitable replacement for ctrl+c, which is no longer available to Ansible;
• each entry other than \r and \n in complete_input could become a new push-button.

Applied to the pause module, that would leave us with one input field and three buttons: "Interrupt", "A" and "C" (respectively "Abort" and "Continue").

These buttons should ideally appear right under the input field. The input field is not always necessary, but there is no proper way to tell. There are various approaches to that:

• using an inputquestion widget and a buttonquestion widget:
  • pro: easy
  • con: clumsy-looking
  • con: we lack a straightforward way to obtain the first answer from two widgets
• extending inputquestion so it offers optional push-buttons.
  • pro: useful
  • pro: better-looking
  • con: does that deserve a new widget? what should get-answer output?
  • con: more work

[xavierog]

extending inputquestion so it offers optional push-buttons.

I chose this way. Specifically, I introduced a question widget that combines the abilities of inputquestion and buttonquestion:

widget \ feature	input field	buttons
inputquestion	yes	no
buttonquestion	no	at least 1
question	Yes	at least 1

That should help me implement this feature request.

[xavierog]

I have implemented and pushed prompt_until():

Your example looks like this:

This feature should land in the next release.

[huyz]

Wow, that's awesome! Bien joué!

[xavierog]

This feature is now available as part of Moulti 1.14.0.

[huyz]

@xavierog Tested and it works great.

Btw, is there a keyboard shortcut to get my cursor inside the prompt's textbox?

[xavierog]

Btw, is there a keyboard shortcut to get my cursor inside the prompt's textbox?

Not in 1.14.0. But I have just pushed a commit (in the devel branch) that implements Ctrl+t and Ctrl+y, which jump to the previous/next unanswered question.