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Ansible: Pure (only in its) pragmatism

by cue_the_strings on 4/19/25, 8:54 PM with 8 comments

• by sam_goody on 4/20/25, 8:39 AM

  The fact that Ansible doesn't allow feedback when a task is running, or give you access to the output of the task [it does give the response, but in a urlencoded json field that is useful but not friendly), makes it incredibly difficult for me to write tasks for, and uncomfortable to use.

  The fact that it makes a new connection for every command, even when just doing a loop, makes it slow as mollasses. To add insult to injury, the name Ansible means "a tool faster than light"!

  The fact that there is no way to return in the middle of a task, means that I cannot use task files as functions - that is, I cannot just tell Ansible that a given file exists it should stop running this taskfile, it will stop the whole playbook or nothing.

  And because I cannot add conditions to a block, that means that the best I can do is make deeply nested layers of playbooks - ie. not the Ansible way.

  These are just off the top of my head - I use Ansible heavily, and curse it all the time!

• by andreareina on 4/20/25, 1:42 AM

  Has Ansible solved the issue where some tasks (e.g. postgresql_user) require a Python module to be available, which you don't want to be installed in the global environment? Last I looked into it you could use a venv but had to monkey around with some envvars and it wasn't ergonomic in the least.