How to easily display startup errors of systemd services using ansible?

Question

As you probably know on systemd if a service fails to start, you get an error code but not output. You have to call systemctl status foobar.service in order to get the output from that service.

I want to build an ansible tasks that displays the errors and fails when needed. Just failing without information is not useful.

Answer 1

Here is my current implementation, which I do not like, as it is make out of too many tasks, hard to read and I do want to be able to re-use it much easier.

- command: systemctl reload foobar.service
        register: result
        ignore_errors: True

      - debug: result
        when: result.rc != 0

      - command: systemctl status foobar.service
        register: result2
        when: result.rc != 0

      - debug: var=result2
        when: result.rc != 0