ansible: promoting warnings to errors - ansible

Question

I have some continuous integration checks which run a few ansible-playbook commands. Each playbook may be running many plays, including numerous large roles.
Every now and then, somebody introduces some change that causes a warning when ansible-playbook runs, e.g. something like this:
[WARNING]: when statements should not include jinja2 templating delimiters
such as {{ }} or {% %}. Found: "{{ some_variable}}" not in
some_result.stdout
or:
[WARNING]: Consider using unarchive module rather than running tar
or some deprecation warnings like:
[DEPRECATION WARNING]: ec2_facts is kept for backwards compatibility but usage
is discouraged. The module documentation details page may explain more about
this rationale.. This feature will be removed in a future release. Deprecation
warnings can be disabled by setting deprecation_warnings=False in ansible.cfg.
and so on. Sometimes these warnings pop up when we upgrade ansible versions. Regardless of why they happen, I would really like for some way to have the ansible-playbook command fail loudly when it causes one of these warnings, instead of quietly proceeding on and having my CI check be successful. Is there any way to do this? I'm using ansible 2.4.3 currently.
I find lots of discussion about ways to hide these warnings, but haven't found anything about promoting them to hard errors.

Answer 1

I have the exact same problem. My workaround is:
run the playbook with --check and 'tee' to a temporary file
do some grep-magic to filter out 'WARNING]:'
do some grep-sed-magic to filter out results that are not zero (except ok/skipped)
I know it is not ideal, so if you came with a nice solution please share :-)

Answer 2

There is an option any_errors_fatal in ansible.cfg, what about putting
any_errors_fatal = True

Answer 3

To hide such [DEPRECATION WARNING] as stated you can
"disabled by setting deprecation_warnings=False in ansible.cfg."
But this may not be ideal, As in future you have no visibility of what may change or being depreciated.
If you are absolutely sure that you can ignore such a warning, You can use::
args:
warn: false
Or modify your code as suggested in the warning message.
else
If you want to raise error for any warnings, You could register the result and apply failed_when like below example.
- hosts: localhost
gather_facts: false
tasks:
- name: Fail if there is any warnings
shell: touch a.txt
register: result
failed_when: result.warnings is defined`

Answer 4

What for? Do they interfere with the implementation of the playbook? Most likely it is not. Just fix the playbook code.
Such a warning to remove as I understood it is either impossible or very difficult (in any case, it did not work for me when I tried):
[WARNING]: when statements should not include jinja2 templating delimiters
such as {{ }} or {% %}. Found: "{{ some_variable}}" not in
some_result.stdout
Just use:
some_variable not in some_result.stdout
In the "when" conditions it is not necessary to set {{}} to get the variable value
Personally, I prefer to search through "find":
some_result.stdout.find(some_variable) == -1
This warning:
[DEPRECATION WARNING]: ec2_facts is kept for backwards compatibility but usage
is discouraged. The module documentation details page may explain more about
this rationale.. This feature will be removed in a future release. Deprecation
warnings can be disabled by setting deprecation_warnings=False in ansible.cfg.
can be removed from output by setting:
deprecation_warnings = false
in the file ansible.cfg
This warn:
[WARNING]: Consider using unarchive module rather than running tar
Easy to remove if you use the module ansible instead of tar in "command":
unarchive: src=file.tgz dest=/opt/dest