Ansible return status - jboss

Question

I have an ansible playbook which deploys a jboss eap instance alongside some other things. The playbook runs fine until it gets to the point to start jboss using the provided standalone.sh script. I am using the shell module to start this script and it works fine in that jboss starts however when the task is executed ansible does not return any status message like a changed or OK and just seems to hang.
Is there a way I can force ansible to see this as something which has changed the system state ?

Answer 1

I don't personally use jboss, but this sounds to me like the startup.sh script simply isn't launching jboss in the background, so ansible is simply waiting for it to end and it never does.
There are a few potential ways you can address this. Given the information in this thread you might want to try a task like this:
- name: start jboss
shell: nohup standalone.sh > /dev/null
async: True
poll: 0
The poll: 0 tells Ansible to 'fire and forget' the command. If you don't include this then Ansible will kill the process when it returns from the remote server.
Another possibility is to use an init script. The thread I linked to above points to a location where you should be able to find an init script. You could install that (and leave it disabled if you don't want jboss to start up when the system reboots), and then simply run it via the service command from Ansible:
- name: start jboss
service: name=jboss state=started
Edit: If you're unwilling or unable to use nohup or an init script that puts jboss into the background then another alternative is to make use of screen if you have that installed and available to you. I regularly do this when invoking long-running commands from Ansible so that I can check back well after the playbook has been run to check on the status of the command:
- name: Invoke long running command
command: /usr/bin/screen -d -m /path/to/my/command
async: True
poll: 0
This will launch a detached screen session and invoke your command inside it. Ansible will promptly forget about it, leaving the command to run on its own.