Pause execution - Ansible module pause

How to pause a playbook execution for a certain amount of minutes or seconds with Ansible.

October 8, 2021

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

I’m going to show you a live demo 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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demo

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

code

pause.yml

---
- name: pause module demo
  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 demo/inventory pause/pause.yml
PLAY [pause module demo] **************************************************************************
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 demo/inventory pause/pause.yml
PLAY [pause module demo] **************************************************************************
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 demo/inventory pause/pause.yml
PLAY [pause module demo] **************************************************************************
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

Recap

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