Ansible - actions BEFORE gathering facts

Question

Does anyone know how to do something (like wait for port / boot of the managed node) BEFORE gathering facts? I know I can turn gathering facts off

gather_facts: no 

and THEN wait for port but what if I need the facts while also still need to wait until the node boots up?

Answer 1

Gathering facts is equivalent to running the setup module. You can manually gather facts by running it. It's not documented, but simply add a task like this:

- name: Gathering facts   setup: 

In combination with gather_facts: no on playbook level the facts will only be fetched when above task is executed.

Both in an example playbook:

- hosts: all   gather_facts: no   tasks:      - name: Some task executed before gathering facts       # whatever task you want to run      - name: Gathering facts       setup: 

Answer 2

Something like this should work:

- hosts: my_hosts   gather_facts: no    tasks:       - name: wait for SSH to respond on all hosts         local_action: wait_for port=22        - name: gather facts         setup:        - continue with my tasks... 

The wait_for will execute locally on your ansible host, waiting for the servers to respond on port 22, then the setup module will perform fact gathering, after which you can do whatever else you need to do.