How can I show progress for a long-running Ansible task?

Ansible has since implemented the following:

---
# Requires ansible 1.8+
- name: 'YUM - async task'
  yum:
    name: docker-io
    state: installed
  async: 1000
  poll: 0
  register: yum_sleeper

- name: 'YUM - check on async task'
  async_status:
    jid: "{{ yum_sleeper.ansible_job_id }}"
  register: job_result
  until: job_result.finished
  retries: 30

For further information, see the official documentation on the topic (make sure you're selecting your version of Ansible).

I came across this problem today on OSX, where I was running a docker shell command which took a long time to build and there was no output whilst it built. It was very frustrating to not understand whether the command had hung or was just progressing slowly.

I decided to pipe the output (and error) of the shell command to a port, which could then be listened to via netcat in a separate terminal.

myplaybook.yml

- name: run some long-running task and pipe to a port
  shell: myLongRunningApp > /dev/tcp/localhost/4000 2>&1

And in a separate terminal window:

$ nc -lk 4000
Output from my
long
running
app will appear here

Note that I pipe the error output to the same port; I could as easily pipe to a different port.

Also, I ended up setting a variable called nc_port which will allow for changing the port in case that port is in use. The ansible task then looks like:

  shell: myLongRunningApp > /dev/tcp/localhost/{{nc_port}} 2>&1

Note that the command myLongRunningApp is being executed on localhost (i.e. that's the host set in the inventory) which is why I listen to localhost with nc.