Ansible fatal error while trying to print the state of firewalld

Question

Here, i am trying to print the status of the firewall-cmd --state command , but a fatal error is being thrown.

 name: Check firewall status
        hosts: st

        tasks:
        - name: Check status of firewall
          command: firewall-cmd --state
          register: status

        - name: Print version
          debug:
             msg: "Status = {{ status.stdout }}"

State is "not running" in the remote host. But am not getting the result.

I get the following output

fatal: [borexample.com]: FAILED! => {"changed": true, "cmd": ["firewall-cmd", "--state"], "delta": "0:00:00.189023", "end": "2018-09-16 11:40:17.319482", "msg": "non-zero return code", "rc": 252, "start": "2018-09-16 11:40:17.130459", "stderr": "", "stderr_lines": [], "stdout": "\u001b[91mnot running\u001b[00m", "stdout_lines": ["\u001b[91mnot running\u001b[00m"]}

How should i modify the code so that i get only the state ?

Answer 1

The ignore_errors suggested by Baptiste Mille-Mathias would allow you to continue, but then you would like to "debug" {{ status.stderr }}, as in that ase stdout would be empty.

Answer 2

I prefer using failed_when: to control your output rc. More info at Ansible Documentation. But you can also use ìgnore_errors: true

Check error codes in the Firewall-cmd Documentation to see which codes adding to your playbook.

In your scenario could be good doing:

  - name: Check status of firewall
    command: firewall-cmd --state
    register: status
    failed_when:
      - status.rc != 0 
      - status.rc != 252

Even you can go further and use failed_when: false to avoid the command failing.