How can eval command work in ansible playbook

Question

I want to eval command via ansible playbook. Here's playbook.

 - name: enable ssh-agent
   command: eval $(ssh-agent)

I tried this playbook.

$ ansible-playbook -i hosts site.yml

But I got this error.

failed: [host] => {"cmd": "eval", "failed": true, "rc": 2}
msg: [Errno 2] No such file or directory

FATAL: all hosts have already failed -- aborting

How eval command work in ansible playbook? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

command module expects an executable as parameter.

eval $(ssh-agent) is an expression that a unix shell can understand not ansible.

as tedder said I don't see why you want to setup ssh-agent, but if you do I recommend you give the shell module a try instead of command . Hope you've set ssh-agent to some appropriate value somehow.

 # Just for debugging.
 - name: enable ssh-agent
   shell: echo "ssh-agent = $(ssh-agent)"
 - name: enable ssh-agent
   shell: eval $(ssh-agent)

In this case ansible would pass the whole string to shell and shell would evaluate it.