Ansible output formatting options

Question

Is there an option to format ansible output with the use of ansible (not any other scripts)? For instance

name: Show version
  sudo: true
  hosts: web_front_end
  tasks:
    - name: Create yum cache
      shell: yum makecache
    - name: Check the version of Portal
      shell: rpm -qa | grep portal
      register: portal
    - debug: msg={{portal.stdout}}
  tags:
    - portal
    - wfe

I would like to get only the

TASK: [debug msg={{portal.stdout}}]

part. Or even is there a way to get only the shell command output?

Answer 1

I have a plugin to format the output. The gist is here but the gist's gist is:

# Save as <folder with your playbook>/callback_plugins/<some name>.py
# Optionally use no_log: True on your playbook/roles/tasks to suppress other output

import sys
import pprint

class CallbackModule(CallbackBase):

    def log(self, host, category, data):
        pp = pprint.PrettyPrinter(indent=2, stream=sys.stdout)
        pp.pprint(data)

Answer 2

You basically have two choices. One is to do what folks have described above, which is to pipe the output of the ansible command to things like perl, sed, awk, etc.

The second alternative is to write your own Python script that calls ansible directly. Ansible is written in Python and as such you can call it directly from your own Python code. The Ansible documentation on its Python API provides details on how to do this.