Feature Req: Display date/time stamp during playbooks run using verbose? about ansible HOT 3 CLOSED

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• bin/ansible

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from ansible.

Hi!

Thanks very much for your submission to Ansible. It means a lot to us that you've taken time to contribute.

Unfortunately, we're not sure if we want this feature in the program, and I don't want this to seem confrontational.
Our reasons for this are:

• This is possible with the ansible.posix.profile_tasks callback

However, we're absolutely always up for discussion.
Because this project is very active, we're unlikely to see comments made on closed tickets and we lock them after some time.
If you or anyone else has any further questions, please let us know by using any of the communication methods listed in the page below:

• https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/community/communication.html

In the future, sometimes starting a discussion on the development list prior to implementing a feature can make getting things included a little easier, but it's not always necessary.

Thank you once again for this and your interest in Ansible!

from ansible.

That's fair, but after close to a decade using Ansible to manage over a thousand servers, this was just 1 too many callbacks on top of other hacks, workarounds and frustrations.

We ended up creating our own solution which gave us these advantages:

• 11x fewer lines (35k lines of yml recipes down to 3k of clean/concise Ruby DSL)
• 35x faster to run (from 20 minutes with Ansible to around 34 seconds with Ruby)
• readable log output, easier profiling
• automatically creating backup files if a file changed
• ability to set timeouts and retries on tasks, etc
• other clever things like if a task is running for >5 min, it will log "Command still running:" with the command in question

Here is an example of the output, showing only the changes being made, with clear timestamps and durations. In contrast to having countless pages of difficult to parse Ansible output, not knowing what is currently running or when previous tasks were completed:

The recipes are much more concise, for example:

# note, the secret_key_base is generated in the erb template
template(secrets_path, 'secrets.sample.yml', mode: '644', user: 'deployer:deployer', overwrite: false)

Instead of:

- name: Check if secrets yml already exists
  ansible.builtin.stat:
    path: "{{ deploy_to }}/config/secrets.yml"
  register: tetherbox_secrets_yml

- name: Generate Rails secret_key_base
  ansible.builtin.command:
    cmd: "openssl rand -hex 64"
  register: secret_key_base
  changed_when: false
  when: tetherbox_secrets_yml.stat.exists is false

- name: Create secrets yml
  ansible.builtin.template:
    src: 'secrets.yml.j2'
    dest: "{{ deploy_to }}/config/secrets.yml"
    mode: '0644'
    owner: '{{ username }}'
    group: '{{ username }}'
  when: tetherbox_secrets_yml.stat.exists is false

We will do a bit more testing and refining and will release this as open source as an alternative to those that want something a bit more opinionated and out of the box, without needing to do callbacks/hacks for basics like standard log output.

from ansible.