How to pause a playbook execution for a certain amount of time with Ansible?

I’m going to show you a live Playbook with some simple Ansible code. I’m Luca Berton and welcome to today’s episode of Ansible Pilot

Ansible pause execution

Today we’re talking about the Ansible module pause. This module is also supported for Windows targets. The full name is ansible.builtin.pause, which means that is part of the collection of modules “builtin” with Ansible and shipped with it. The default behavior is to pause with a prompt. Pauses playbook execution for a set amount of time, or until a prompt is acknowledged.

Parameters

  • minutes string - a positive number of minutes
  • seconds string - a positive number of seconds
  • prompt string - “Text message”
  • echo boolean - yes/no

All parameters are optional. The default behavior is to pause with a prompt. You could specify the amount of time using the parameters “minutes” and “seconds”. Starting in Ansible 2.2, if you specify 0 or negative for minutes or seconds, it will wait for 1 second, previously it would wait indefinitely. When minutes or seconds are specified, user input is not captured or echoed, regardless of the echo setting. I’ll cover the user input in another video.

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Playbook

Let’s jump in a real-life Ansible Playbook to pause a playbook execution.

code

  • pause.yml
---
- name: pause module Playbook
  hosts: all
  vars:
    wait_seconds: 10
  tasks:
    - name: pause for {{ wait_seconds | int }} second(s)
      ansible.builtin.pause:
        seconds: "{{ wait_seconds | int }}"
- name: message
      ansible.builtin.debug:
        msg: "The end"

output

$ ansible-playbook -i Playbook/inventory pause/pause.yml
PLAY [pause module Playbook] **************************************************************************
TASK [Gathering Facts] ****************************************************************************
ok: [demo.example.com]
TASK [pause for 10 second(s)] *********************************************************************
Pausing for 10 seconds
(ctrl+C then 'C' = continue early, ctrl+C then 'A' = abort)
ok: [demo.example.com]
TASK [message] ************************************************************************************
ok: [demo.example.com] => {
    "msg": "The end"
}
PLAY RECAP ****************************************************************************************
demo.example.com           : ok=3    changed=0    unreachable=0    failed=0    skipped=0    rescued=0    ignored=0

output with manual continue (CTRL+C and “C”)


$ ansible-playbook -i Playbook/inventory pause/pause.yml
PLAY [pause module Playbook] **************************************************************************
TASK [Gathering Facts] ****************************************************************************
ok: [demo.example.com]
TASK [pause for 10 second(s)] *********************************************************************
Pausing for 10 seconds
(ctrl+C then 'C' = continue early, ctrl+C then 'A' = abort)
Press 'C' to continue the play or 'A' to abort 
ok: [demo.example.com]
TASK [message] ************************************************************************************
ok: [demo.example.com] => {
    "msg": "The end"
}

output with manual abort (CTRL+C and “A”)

$ ansible-playbook -i Playbook/inventory pause/pause.yml
PLAY [pause module Playbook] **************************************************************************
TASK [Gathering Facts] ****************************************************************************
ok: [demo.example.com]
TASK [pause for 10 second(s)] *********************************************************************
Pausing for 10 seconds
(ctrl+C then 'C' = continue early, ctrl+C then 'A' = abort)
Press 'C' to continue the play or 'A' to abort 
fatal: [demo.example.com]: FAILED! => {"msg": "user requested abort!"}
NO MORE HOSTS LEFT ********************************************************************************
PLAY RECAP ****************************************************************************************
demo.example.com           : ok=1    changed=0    unreachable=0    failed=1    skipped=0    rescued=0    ignored=0

code with ❤️ in GitHub

Conclusion

Now you know how to pause a playbook execution for certain amount of time with Ansible. Subscribe to the YouTube channel, Medium, and Website, X (formerly Twitter) to not miss the next episode of the Ansible Pilot.

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