How to print on screen in Ansible

If you can’t but really want

Sometime you want to print something on the screen in the middle of playbook. You have measly debug module, and, that’s all.

How about multi-line text with colors, formatting, etc, etc?

Officially you can’t do this. But if you are REAALLY motivated… Nothing can stop you.

The solution

Use /dev/tty

Example

---
- hosts: localhost
  gather_facts: false
  tasks:
   - shell: "echo '{{'='*10}} {{red}}H{{green}}E{{cyan}}L{{red}}L{{green}}O{{cyan}}!{{CSI}}0m {{'='*10}}' > /dev/tty"
  vars:
    CSI: "\x1B["
    red: '{{CSI}}31m'
    green: '{{CSI}}32m'
    cyan: '{{CSI}}36m'

And, of course, you can jinja as you want to write a lengthy messages, you can print files (cat), show output for other utilities (echo reg.stdout > /dev/tty), etc.

One important note: we are talking about localhost /dev/tty, don’t try this on remote servers.

If example with escape codes is too scary, here the simpler example:

- hosts: localhost
  gather_facts: false
  tasks:
   - shell: head /etc/passwd > /dev/tty

Have fun!