How do I debug Ansible includes and dependencies?

Question

I've joined a project which has a large number of playbooks and roles, and which makes heavy use of include (often in a nested fashion) in order to include playbooks/roles within existing playbooks/roles. (Whether this is good or bad practice should be considered out of scope of this question, because it's not something I can immediately change. Note also that include_role is not used because these playbooks were written well before 2.2 was out, and are still in the process of being updated.)

Normally when running ansible-playbook, the output just shows each task being run, but it does not show the includes which pull in extra tasks. This makes it hard to how the overall flow jumps around between playbooks. In contrast, include_vars tasks are included in the output. I'm guessing this is because it's an Ansible module, whereas include isn't really a module.

So without having to modify the playbooks, is there way to run playbooks which shows the following?

when include directives are triggering, and
(ideally) also the exact files which are being included, since it's not always obvious how relative paths are converted into absolute paths

I've found lots of advice on various ways to debug playbooks, but nothing which achieves this. Bonus points if it also shows when roles are being included via meta role dependencies!

I'm aware that there are tools such as ansigenome which do static analysis of playbooks, but I'm hoping for something which can output the information at playbook run-time, for any playbook I choose to invoke.

If it's not currently possible, would it be a reasonable feature request?

Konstantin Suvorov Konstantin Suvorov · Accepted Answer · 2017-08-30T19:15:05

Try executing ansible-playbook -vv, it shows "task path" for every executed task, like this:

TASK [debug] *********************************************
task path: /path/to/task/file.yml:5
ok: [localhost] => {
    "msg": "aaa"
}

So you can easily track actual file (included or not) path and line number.

As for includes, there are different type of includes in current Ansible versions (2.2, 2.3): static and dynamic.
Static includes happen during parse time and information about them is printed (with -vv verbosity) at the very beginning of playbook run.
Dynamic includes happen in runtime and you can see cyan "included" lines in the output.

How do I debug Ansible includes and dependencies?

1 Answers