Quick Tip: Ansible Library Debugging

If you’re in a pinch trying to work out why your Ansible library scripts aren’t working, you may be somewhat displeased when you finally work out that print() doesn’t work inline.

However, you can always use logging, but that’s somewhat convoluted to setup.

Thankfully, I’ve just found out about the q package (“q(uick and dirty debugging)”)

To use:

• install the package
  • pip install q
• import it into your library/module/python file
  • import q
• then just wrap whatever output you need
  • q(whenever)
  • q(wherever)

Once your script/library/tokeniser has finished executing, your results will be in $TMPDIR/q

$ cat $TMPDIR/q

 5.1s main: whenever=['Song', 'Title']
 5.1s main: wherever={'Likes': ['Puns']}

The output is formatted with timestamps, and colours (that don’t show up in markdown)

Hopefully this will help shortcut your ‘how do I debug’ woes!

https://github.com/zestyping/q