How do I avoid ansible deployment failures due to dpkg lock file?

Question

It seems that getting failures due to /var/lib/dpkg/lock is something not very rare. Based on observations these are caused most of the time 9/10 due to state lock file or while a cron job was running.

This means that a retry mechanism combined with a removal of stale file could be the solution.

How can I do this in ansible?

Answer 1

I'd try to solve this with until feature of ansible (http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/playbooks_loops.html#do-until-loops)

    - name: Apt for sure
      apt: name=foobar state=present
      register: apt_status
      # 2018 syntax:
      # until: apt_status|success
      # 2020 syntax:
      until: apt_status is success
      delay: 6
      retries: 10