I am trying my hand on Ansible after having a very nice training in it. Currently, my task is to create a playbook that sets up a PostgreSQL cluster (with Patroni and etcd).
However, while installing PostgreSQL should be a pretty easy task, doing it using the zypper plugin throws an error. First, the part of the playbook that should install PostgreSQL:
- name: Installation PostgreSQL 14 Latest ohne Recommendations
become: true
zypper:
disable_recommends: true
name:
postgresql14-server
postgresql14-contrib
postgresql14-devel
update_cache: true
when: ansible_host in pgservers
The error message given is this:
fatal: [goeccdb22l]: FAILED! => {"changed": false, "cmd": ["/usr/bin/zypper", "--quiet", "--non-interactive", "--xmlout", "install", "--type", "package", "--auto-agree-with-licenses", "--no-recommends", "--", "+postgresql14-server postgresql14-contrib postgresql14-devel"], "msg": "No provider of '+postgresql14-server postgresql14-contrib postgresql14-devel' found.", "rc": 104, "stderr": "", "stderr_lines": [], "stdout": "<?xml version='1.0'?>\n<stream>\n<message type=\"error\">No provider of '+postgresql14-server postgresql14-contrib postgresql14-devel' found.</message>\n</stream>\n", "stdout_lines": ["<?xml version='1.0'?>", "<stream>", "<message type=\"error\">No provider of '+postgresql14-server postgresql14-contrib postgresql14-devel' found.</message>", "</stream>"]}
Let's extract the error message:
"msg": "No provider of '+postgresql14-server postgresql14-contrib postgresql14-devel' found."
I tried to replicate the problem using the shell on the target server. However, running the command seems to be able to install the packages:
ansible@goeccdb22l:~> sudo /usr/bin/zypper install --type package --auto-agree-with-licenses --no-recommends -- +postgresql14-server postgresql14-contrib postgresql14-devel
Loading repository data...
Reading installed packages...
Resolving package dependencies...
The following 12 NEW packages are going to be installed:
libecpg6 libopenssl-1_1-devel libpq5 postgresql postgresql14 postgresql14-contrib postgresql14-devel postgresql14-server postgresql-contrib postgresql-devel postgresql-server zlib-devel
The following package needs additional customer contract to get support:
postgresql14
12 new packages to install.
Overall download size: 8.0 MiB. Already cached: 0 B. After the operation, additional 35.4 MiB will be used.
Continue? [y/n/v/...? shows all options] (y):
I've removed only the --quiet and --non-interactive options from the command, but kept all other given options.
The best idea I have is that the user/privilege escalation workings could be different from me logging in as the Ansible user to the target and just using sudo before the command.
Edit 1: I have developed an idea what the problem could be. As I mentioned above, when I tested the command, I removed two options: --quiet and --non-interactive. Testing the command with those two options gives the message:
The flag --quiet is not known.
However, using man zypper, I can clearly see that --quiet is a documented option:
-q, --quiet
Suppress normal output. Brief (esp. result notification) messages and error messages will still be printed, though. If used together with conflicting --verbose option, the --verbose option takes preference.
Now, my idea is that Ansible calls the command it documents in the return XML, but that because somehow --quiet is not understood it interprets that as nothing providing the requested package list. So that would leave two questions:
- Why is
--quietnot understood, yet documented? Is that a problem of SLES vs. OpenSuse? - How to work around that?
As the Ansible zypper module has no option to suppress the --quiet option I don't see any chance of working around it with parameters. The last option would be to split the zypper task into smaller shell tasks which I would like to avoid if possible.
