Ansible Playbook Essentials

Adding pre-tasks and post-tasks to playbooks

We would like to print status messages before and after we begin applying Nginx. Let's add it to our www.yml playbook with the pre_tasks and post_tasks parameters:

---
- hosts: www
  remote_user: vagrant
  sudo: yes
  pre_tasks:
     - shell: echo 'I":" Beginning to configure web server..'
  roles:
     - nginx
  post_tasks:
     - shell: echo 'I":" Done configuring nginx web server...'

In the preceding example, we only printed some messages using the echo command. However, we can create tasks using any of the modules available with Ansible, which can run before, or after, applying roles.