Documentation

Common Return Values

Ansible modules normally return a data structure that can be registered into a variable, or seen directly when using the ansible program as output. Here we document the values common to all modules, each module can optionally document its own unique returns. If these docs exist they will be visible through ansible-doc and https://docs.ansible.com.

Facts

Some modules return ‘facts’ to ansible (i.e setup), this is done through a ‘ansible_facts’ key and anything inside will automatically be available for the current host directly as a variable and there is no need to register this data.

Status

Every module must return a status, saying if the module was successful, if anything changed or not. Ansible itself will return a status if it skips the module due to a user condition (when: ) or running in check mode when the module does not support it.

Other common returns

It is common on failure or success to return a ‘msg’ that either explains the failure or makes a note about the execution. Some modules, specifically those that execute shell or commands directly, will return stdout and stderr, if ansible sees a stdout in the results it will append a stdout_lines which is just a list or the lines in stdout.

See also

About Modules
Learn about available modules
GitHub Core modules directory
Browse source of core modules
Github Extras modules directory
Browse source of extras modules.
Mailing List
Development mailing list
irc.freenode.net
#ansible IRC chat channel