How to continue Vagrant/Ansible provision script from error? - vagrant

Question

After I provision my Vagrant... I may get errors during provision... how do I restart from error, instead of doing everything from scratch ?
vagrant destroy -f && vagrant up
And I may get an error...
PLAY RECAP ********************************************************************
to retry, use: --limit #/path/to/playbook.retry
And I want to just resume from where it failed... it seems it can be done by the message... use --limit.... but when I use it in the vagrant context it doesn't work..

Answer 1

You can edit the Vagrantfile and include the ansible.start_at_task variable.
Then you can re-run the provision with $ vagrant reload --provision
Vagrant Reload docs
However, because Ansible plays are idempotent you don't really need to do the start_at_task. You can just re-run the provision with the reload command above.

Answer 2

You could do an ansible run with ansible-playbook on your vagrant box. The trick is to use the inventory file ansible has created. It is located in your .vagrant foler.
ansible-playbook playbook.yml -i vagrant/.vagrant/provisioners/ansible/inventory/vagrant_ansible_inventory --start-at-task='MY_TASK'
Vagrantfile: Assign your roles to a vagrant machines.
config.vm.provision "ansible" do |ansible|
ansible.verbose = "v"
ansible.playbook = "../playbook.yml"
ansible.groups = {
"web" => ['vm01app'],
"db" => ['vm01db'],
}
end

Answer 3

To start provisioning at a particular task:
vagrant ssh
provision --list-tasks
provision --start-at-task {task}
If there's anything that needs to be fixed, you can either do it while SSHed to the server, or you can make the changes in the host machine, then sync those changes to the Vagrant host.
https://developer.hashicorp.com/vagrant/docs/synced-folders
So, for instance, if you're using rsync as the sync type, you can sync the changes by running
vagrant rsync

Answer 4

If you used shell as provisioner instead of Ansible (for this you would need to have Ansible installed in the VM itself) you could run a command like this:
test -f "/path/to/playbook.retry" && (ansible-playbook site.yml --limit #/path/to/playbook.retry; rm -f "/path/to/playbook.retry") || ansible-playbook site.yml
This would basically check if a retry file exists, if it does it would run the playbook with that limit and delete the retry file after, if not it would run the whole playbook. Of course you would need to run these commands with sudo if you are using Vagrant, but that is easy to add.