How do I access the command line arguments used to invoke Ansible?

Question

I'd like to print out the command line arguments used to invoke ansible-playbook. E.g., if I do

ansible-playbook foo.yml -e bar=quux

, I'd like to have access to the above string, so that I can do as a task

- shell: slack_notify.sh "{{ ansible_cli_invocation }}"

where ansible_cli_invocation is a string with the value "ansible-playbook foo.yml -e bar=quux". Is there a way to do this?

Answer 1

I'm not sure you can do it out of the box.
But you can write a tiny action plugin:

from ansible.plugins.action import ActionBase
import sys

class ActionModule(ActionBase):

    TRANSFERS_FILES = False

    def run(self, tmp=None, task_vars=None):
        return { 'changed': False, 'ansible_facts': { 'argv': sys.argv } }

Save it as ./action_plugins/get_argv.py and also make an empty file ./library/get_argv.py. This creates local action get_argv that populates argv fact with arguments list.

Then in your playbook:

- get_argv:
- shell: slack_notify.sh "{{ argv | join(' ') }}"