Ansible failure message based on conditional failed_when

user_13930843 0
Viewed 2875

I'm trying to clean up some of our expected errors and make them more understandable to the operators running the playbooks. The code below works just fine, but I would like to assign a custom message to each of the failure conditions. For example, if var1 does not equal 4 then I'd like to present a message that says "There were not 4 entries in the lldp neighbor for neighbor x"

   - name: Verify Number of bundles for output of show lldp neigh
     set_fact:
       var1: "{{lldp_spine3.data | regex_findall('ae1')}}"
       var2: "{{lldp_spine3.data | regex_findall('ae2')}}"
     failed_when: (var1 != 4) or (var2 | length != 4)

I know I can split those up and follow the logic below but I'd like to know if I can accomplish this in a single play.

- fail:
    msg: "There were not 4 entries in the lldp neighbor for neighbor x"
  when: var1|length != 4
  
- fail:
    msg: "There were not 4 entries in the lldp neighbor for neighbor y"
  when: var2|length != 4
ansible
2 Answers

There is assert module for that:

- assert:
    that: var2|length == 4
    msg: 'lldp should have four neighbors'

Few more tricks:

  1. Some assertion can be run against localhost and only once (f.e. ansible version), there is run_once: true for that.

  2. Add tags: [always] to guarantee that assertion task is executed.

user_22812740

What about using a loop?

Given the playbook:

- hosts: all
  gather_facts: no

  vars:
    var1: abcde
    var2: abcd
      
  tasks:
    - fail:
        msg: "{{ item.msg }}"
      when: item.condition
      loop_control:
        label: "{{ item.item }} is {{ 'invalid' if item.condition else 'valid' }}"
      loop: 
        - msg: There were not 4 entries in the lldp neighbor for neighbor var1
          condition: "{{ var1 | length != 4 }}"
          item: var1
        - msg: There were not 4 entries in the lldp neighbor for neighbor var2
          condition: "{{ var2 | length != 4 }}"
          item: var2

This yields the recap:

PLAY [all] **********************************************************************************************************

TASK [fail] *********************************************************************************************************
failed: [localhost] (item=var1 is invalid) => {"ansible_loop_var": "item", "changed": false, "item": {"condition": true, "item": "var1", "msg": "There were not 4 entries in the lldp neighbor for neighbor var1"}, "msg": "There were not 4 entries in the lldp neighbor for neighbor var1"}
skipping: [localhost] => (item=var2 is valid) 

PLAY RECAP **********************************************************************************************************
localhost                  : ok=0    changed=0    unreachable=0    failed=1    skipped=0    rescued=0    ignored=0
user_21235300
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