Background Task Execution

We can do background task execution with -B and -P

Basically,

• -B provides the time to kill this process. We can increase the timeout if we want to
• -P provides what's the time to do polling (ansible will poll the status to check the status of the task).
  • Specify 0 if you want ansible to fire and forget

So for example, we can execute like this:

ansible -i inventory.yml server -b -m command -a "apt upgrade -y" -B 3600 -P 0

This will be executed in the background and then return the ansible_job_id.

For example:

[WARNING]: Platform linux on host app3 is using the discovered Python interpreter at /usr/bin/python3.8, but future installation of another Python interpreter could change the meaning of
that path. See https://docs.ansible.com/ansible-core/2.17/reference_appendices/interpreter_discovery.html for more information.
app3 | CHANGED => {
    "ansible_facts": {
        "discovered_interpreter_python": "/usr/bin/python3.8"
    },
    "ansible_job_id": "j159068683693.1879",
    "changed": true,
    "finished": 0,
    "results_file": "/root/.ansible_async/j159068683693.1879",
    "started": 1
}
[WARNING]: Platform linux on host app1 is using the discovered Python interpreter at /usr/bin/python3.8, but future installation of another Python interpreter could change the meaning of
that path. See https://docs.ansible.com/ansible-core/2.17/reference_appendices/interpreter_discovery.html for more information.
app1 | CHANGED => {
    "ansible_facts": {
        "discovered_interpreter_python": "/usr/bin/python3.8"
    },
    "ansible_job_id": "j509933346296.1494",
    "changed": true,
    "finished": 0,
    "results_file": "/root/.ansible_async/j509933346296.1494",
    "started": 1
}
[WARNING]: Platform linux on host app2 is using the discovered Python interpreter at /usr/bin/python3.8, but future installation of another Python interpreter could change the meaning of
that path. See https://docs.ansible.com/ansible-core/2.17/reference_appendices/interpreter_discovery.html for more information.
app2 | CHANGED => {
    "ansible_facts": {
        "discovered_interpreter_python": "/usr/bin/python3.8"
    },
    "ansible_job_id": "j424542566402.1459",
    "changed": true,
    "finished": 0,
    "results_file": "/root/.ansible_async/j424542566402.1459",
    "started": 1
}

We can then check the status for each task by using

ansible -i inventory.yml app3 -b -m async_status -a "jid=j159068683693.1879"