Check if service exists with Ansible

Question

I have an Ansible playbook for deploying a Java app as an init.d daemon.

Being a beginner in both Ansible and Linux I\'m having trouble to conditionally execute task

Answer 1

I modified Florian's answer to only use the return code of the service command (this worked on Mint 18.2)

- name: Check if Logstash service exist
  shell: service logstash status 
  register: logstash_status
  failed_when: not(logstash_status.rc == 3 or logstash_status.rc == 0)

- name: Check if Logstash service exist
  service:
    name: logstash
    state: stopped 
  when: logstash_status.rc == 0