The Problem

You want to use Ansible’s docker_container module to do stuff, but want to also perform actions based on their output without specifying a logging driver or writing to a temp file.

The Solution

Do this:

The Problem

Ansible is a great configuration management platform with a very, very extensible language for expressing yoru infrastructure as code. It works really well for common workflows (deploying files, adding authorized_keys, creating new EC2 instances, etc), but its limitations become readily apparent as you begin embarking in more custom and complex plays.

Here’s a quick example. Let’s say you have a playbook that uses a variable (or var in Ansible-speak) that contains a list of tables, like this:

Scenario

A file share that a group in your business is dependent on is running out of space. As usual, they have no idea why they’re running out of space, but they need you, the sysadmin, to fix it, and they need it done yesterday.

This has been really easy for Linux admins for a long time now: Do this

du -h / | sort -nr

and delete folders or files from folders at the top that look like they want to be deleted.

Windows admins haven’t been so lucky…at least those that wanted to do it on the command-line (which is becoming increasingly important as Microsoft focuses more on promoting Windows Server Core and PowerShell). `