how to prevent Ansible from showing output on screen?

Question

I have this in my playbook which execute a command on remote server and enters its log on local server.

 - name: run script
   shell: runuser -l testuser -c "/tmp/test.sh"
   register: myshell_output
 - name: copy output to a local file
   lineinfile:
     dest: /thesaurus/output
     line: "{{ item }}"
     insertafter: EOF
   with_items:
    - "#####################Beginning##########################"
    - "{{ myshell_output.stdout }}"
    - "########################END#############################"
   delegate_to: localhost

the output is always shown on screen and troubleshooting gets hard and distracting.

TASK [run script] ************
changed: [1.1.1.1]
changed: [2.2.2.2]
TASK [copy output to a local file] ***********
changed: [1.1.1.1 -> localhost] => 
(item=#####################Beginning##########################)
 ok: [2.2.2.2 -> localhost] => 
(item=#####################Beginning##########################)
{
  REALLY LONG AND BIG OUTPUT!
}
changed: [1.1.1.1 -> localhost] => 
(item=########################END#############################)
ok: [2.2.2.2 -> localhost] => 
(item=########################END#############################)

is it possible to prevent Ansible from printing these output on screen and just insert output to a file?

Solution

This can be done by judicious use of one of the Ansible callback plugins. Set the relevant configuration in your ansible.cfg file.

You have a few options...

In order to print nothing to the screen, you can use the null callback:

This callback prevents outputing events to screen

However, this may be overkill and doesn't do what you want, which is to write the output to a file. This can be done with either of the

• tree or
• log_plays

modules.

I would probably suggest the log_plays module in your case.

Note: This is going straight from the documentation. I haven't used the tree or log_plays plugin myself, opting either for the yaml or profile_tasks one, to make things more readable. It also seems like you want to filter just a part of the output, not all of it. You may want to use a combination of filters in order to get the desired effect.