Get the pid of a running playbook for use within the playbook

Question

When we run a playbook, with verbose output enabled, in the ansible logs we can see something like this:

2016-02-03 12:51:58,235 p=4105 u=root | PLAY RECAP

Answer 1

This might be what you are looking for, but is only applicable to Linux:

- name: Get the pid of this playbook
  shell: pstree -spal $PPID | grep ansible-playbook | awk '{print $1;exit}' | awk -F, '{print $2}'
  register: ansible_pid

- name: Set the ansible playbook pid variable
  set_fact:
    ansible_playbook_pid: "{{ ansible_pid.stdout|int }}"

Answer 2

This sounds a little like an XY problem, but one option may be to spawn a shell with the shell command and then ask for the parent PID:

- name: get pid of playbook
  shell: |
    echo "$PPID"
  register: playbook_pid

This will give you the PID of the python process that is executing the playbook.

Answer 3

If you will be using the pid in different plays, just add it to the setup module.

setup_result['ansible_facts']['ansible_pid'] = os.getpid()

and it will always be available.

    "ansible_os_family": "Debian",
    "ansible_pid": 27930,
    "ansible_pkg_mgr": "apt",

Answer 4

You can refer to the pids module new with v2.8. which delivers all pids for a specific process name to you.

Simple example to get Pids of Ansible Playbooks on host machines:

- hosts: localhost
  tasks:

    - name: "get pids! and no, 'ansible-playboo' is no typo"
      pids:
        name: ansible-playboo
      register: pids_of_python

    - name: "Print pids"
      debug:
        msg: "PIDs: {{ pids_of_python.pids|join(',') }}"

Downside: you'll have to install psutil

Please refer to https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/modules/pids_module.html

Answer 5

You can define the PID for localhost using the set_fact module with a lookup filter.

- hosts: localhost
  tasks:
    - set_fact:
        pid: "{{ lookup('pipe', 'echo $PPID') }}"

And later on you can reference the PID via the hostvars dictionary.

- hosts: remote
  tasks:
    - debug: var=hostvars.localhost.pid