Obtain an Ansible Job output from Ansible Tower API

 April 27, 2022

A couple of years back, I wrote a blogpost on obtaining the previous Job ID in Ansible Tower workflow. Now, let’s go further and create another module to obtain the output of such a job.

Before moving further, I want to specify that I talk about Ansible Tower since this is the most known name for this software, but I could also be talking about AWX or Ansible Controller since those are the same codebase. AWX is the open-source upstream project. Ansible Tower is the former name of the Red Hat product based on AWX. Ansible Controller is the name of the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2 component based on AWX.

Obtain previous Job ID in Ansible Tower Workflow

 November 15, 2020

Ansible Tower allows you to create Workflows, which enable you to create complex workflows by putting together multiple Ansible Playbooks. Ansible Tower Workflows can have some simple logics, such as run different Ansible Playbooks based on the outcome (success or failure) of a previous Ansible Playbook run. Sometimes, though, you need to have more information about a previous Ansible Playbook run than just the outcome.

I recently found myself in a situation where I had an Ansible Tower Workflow with two Ansible Playbooks into it, where the first one was performing specific tasks. The second one needed to get and process the output of the first Ansible Playbook. Since Ansible Tower provides an API to fetch an Ansible Playbook run output, this part is trivial if you know the Job ID that Ansible Tower assigned to that specific run. Looking around, I’ve not found much information on how to retrieve the Job ID of a different Job, so I looked at the various APIs and found this solution, which I’m going to share with you today. I’ve not found much information about getting another Job ID because it is usually a bad practice to do such a thing and that very often you can achieve the same goal in a much cleaner way. This better option, though, was not present in my case. Due to many constraints I had in this project, this was the best way I’ve found, even if I’ve tried - at least mentally - many other ways before accepting that this was the only one in my case.