Is there a way to check playbook syntax and variables?

I'm trying to dry-run(--check) but for some reasons it works really slow. It looks like it tries to perform an action instead of just check the syntax

I want to omit en errors like this:

..."msg": "AnsibleUndefinedVariable: ERROR! 'application_name' is undefined"}

4 Answers

This is expected behaviour according to the documentation:

When ansible-playbook is executed with --check it will not make any changes on remote systems. Instead, any module instrumented to support ‘check mode’ (which contains most of the primary core modules, but it is not required that all modules do this) will report what changes they would have made rather than making them. Other modules that do not support check mode will also take no action, but just will not report what changes they might have made.

Old link (does not work anymore):

New link:

If you would like to check the YAML syntax you can use syntax-check.

ansible-playbook rds_prod.yml --syntax-check
playbook: rds_prod.yml

5

I was looking for the same, but was not satisfied by the --syntax-check option, since it does not work its way down to the roles. A more complete check can be performed with ansible-lint which also includes style-checks. But if you turn off all style-checks, then you have a pretty complete syntax-check.

So do something like

ansible-lint -x $(echo $(ansible-lint -L | awk -F':' '{print $1}' | grep '^[^ ]') | tr ' ' ',') my_playbook.yml

3

Add a task to fail the playbook when variables aren't defined. This should be the first task run.

Another option is to ensure that all variables have a default value in the /defaults/ directory so that it never fails, but the variables can still be overwritten at other levels.

My preferd way is

pip install yamllint
yamllint -d "{extends: default, rules: {quoted-strings: enable}}" .

Since I really want to catch quote errors, e.g.

validate: bash -c ' ' \""

This is valid yaml, since yaml will just quote the string and turn it into:

 validate: "bash -c ' ' \\\"\""

Whilst there was just clearly a quote missing at the beginning of the validate comand.

So a normal yaml checker will not detect this, yamllint wil not even detect this in it's default configuration, so turn on quoted-strings checker.

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