Executing Expect command with ansible is not outputing anything - ansible

Question

I can access the remote server without problem and I would like to send bwcli command which is a CLI of Broadworks server. I am using a shell code to send the command.
Normally if i want to enter the cli I type bwcli but it is not recognized when doing it remotely so I am sendig this sudo -u bworks /usr/local/broadworks/bw_base/bin/bwcli
instead like this:
#! /usr/bin/expect
expect ":"
send "sudo -u bworks /usr/local/broadworks/bw_base/bin/bwcli\r"
expect ">"
send "?\r"
expect "AS_CLI>"
My playbook is done like this:
-script: /home/ansible/playbooks/David/get_command.sh >> bwcli_login.log
When the playbook is ran it shows OK=1 changed=1 unreachable=0 failed=0.
So I am assuming that it works,but when I go to open "bwcli_login.log" I find it empty.
This is only my first step in the code I would like when I enter the CLI the I send some other commands to retrieve some information for the server. And it is annoying that I am stuck at the first step :(
I appreciate if somebody can tell me why the file output file is empty? What I am doing wrong?

Answer 1

Is it works when you manually run the script on the remote server without ansible ?
You can execute a script with different user without using sudo su <username> in your script, also check/share the output from ansible with stdout_lines, it will be easier to debug.
script:
#! /usr/bin/expect
expect ":"
send "/usr/local/broadworks/bw_base/bin/bwcli\r"
expect ">"
send "?\r"
expect "AS_CLI>"
ansible:
- name: run script
script: /home/ansible/playbooks/David/get_command.sh
become: yes
become_user: bworks
register: out
- debug: var=out.stdout_lines
Have you tried to use ansible expect_module ?
I am not famialer with BroadWorks at all, but maybe you can try to do something like the below example.
You will need:
The command module takes command to run,
responses - Mapping of expected string/regex and string to respond with. If the response is a list, successive matches return successive responses.
http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/expect_module.html
I am not sure if the below example it is what you need or if it will work, just something to work with.
- name: expect test
expect:
command: /usr/local/broadworks/bw_base/bin/bwcli
response:
'>': "?\r"

Answer 2

You must consider that when in the BroadWorks CLI, the 'cd' command acts similarly to the equivalent shell command to navigate from one CLI context to the other. However, I'm not sure there is a root as in 'send "cd /Monitoring/Report"\r'.
To get back in the root of the CLI, you could use: 'send "qa; cd Monitoring/Report;"\r' instead.
Furthermore to verify that you moved to the right CLI context, you might want to ' expect "Monitoring/Report>"' intead of '>'.
Note that expect could be used to define functions.

Answer 3

I had the same issue. I found that you need to run the bwcli command with the -nobash option.
Playbook:
- name: Play 1
hosts: mediaservers
tasks:
- name: Play - 1 change to bwcli using script
script: /etc/ansible/bwcli.sh
args:
executable: /usr/bin/expect
register: bwcli_output
- debug: var=bwcli_output
Expect Script
#!/usr/bin/expect
# This will set a timeout for each send command sent to remote server
set timeout 20
spawn bash
send "bwcli -nobash\r";
expect "*_CLI*"
send "int;snmp;v3u\r"
expect "*V3Users*"
send "delete bwems\r"
expect "*Warning: The SNMP Agent needs to be restarted*"
send "get\r"
expect "*_CLI*"
send "exit\r"
expect "*Yes*\r"
send "Yes\r"
expect eof