Ansible command returns change instead of success

Question

I'm learning ansible and encountered a situation which is not clear. Running the following module command the result is a 'Changed'.

ansible agent.example.com -i inventory -m copy -a 'content="Node Managed by Ansible\n" dest=/etc/motd'

Why am I not getting a successful response. I have confirmed that the motd file is actually being modified.

Here is the out put of the task.

agent.example.com | CHANGED => {
    "changed": true, 
    "checksum": "3eb89f442d0bec80f2c59d6d66d621cc4ced7272", 
    "dest": "/etc/motd", 
    "gid": 0, 
    "group": "root", 
    "md5sum": "2e92a9663d317113e1c4bafb2610f3d5", 
    "mode": "0644", 
    "owner": "root", 
    "secontext": "system_u:object_r:etc_t:s0", 
    "size": 24, 
    "src": "/home/admin/.ansible/tmp/ansible-tmp-1543639577.88-189984200437408/source", 
    "state": "file", 
    "uid": 0
}

Solution

In Ansible, a play with the status of 'CHANGED' is a successful response. If it wasn't successful, it would have reported back that the play 'FAILED'.

In an Ansible playbook, you can suppress the 'CHANGED' status by adding changed_when: false to a play. If the play is successful, the status would then be 'OK'.

Comments

[dcrearer]

I’m following a live lesson and the instructors out yielded successful -all green- so I was alarmed to not have the same status. Thanks for the feedback.

[Surabhi]

@dcrearer: I can see why that would alarm you then. I have experienced that both green and yellow responses are successful.

[dcrearer]

Awesome thanks again for the quick response. I’m now getting success after login out and back into the vm’s