I'm trying to use ansible shell module in order to start a bunch of services on RHEL hosts. It works well with systemctl stop and status and lies with the start one...
ansible all -i "host1,host2," -m shell -a "systemctl start example-service" -u priv-user -K
Actually, it starts a service for 3-4s or so and outputs pid of the process, which goes down eventually.
So, some services manage to survive with the line below. Anyway, this trick is not universal...
ansible all -i "host1,host2," -m shell -a "systemctl start example-service; sleep 10" -u priv-user -K
I know playbooks can cover it with no problem with async and poll. However, I prefer to use shell module inline to quickly fix or check some minor stuff.
Using the shell module for that is very bad practice. You should use the service or systemd (as you are using systemd) module.
ansible all -i "host1,host2," -m systemd -a "name=example-service state=started" -u priv-user -K
Or with service:
ansible all -i "host1,host2," -m service -a "name=example-service state=started" -u priv-user -K