Document debugging conditionals (#80239)

##### SUMMARY
Add a section to the docs describing how to debug conditional statements - how to get Ansible to show you whether your `when:` clause evaluates to `true` or `false`.

I ran into trouble with this and couldn't find anything in the docs. Thought I'd add it.


##### ISSUE TYPE
- Docs Pull Request

+label: docsite_pr
pull/80247/head
Alicia Cozine 2 years ago committed by GitHub
parent 0a6333f7d0
commit 507fd1bd60
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@ -464,6 +464,44 @@ For example, you can template out a configuration file that is very different be
- default.conf
mypaths: ['search_location_one/somedir/', '/opt/other_location/somedir/']
.. _debugging_conditionals:
Debugging conditionals
======================
If your conditional ``when`` statement is not behaving as you intended, you can add a ``debug`` statement to determine if the condition evaluates to ``true`` or ``false``. A common cause of unexpected behavior in conditionals is testing an integer as a string or a string as an integer. To debug a conditional statement, add the entire statement as the ``var:`` value in a ``debug`` task. Ansible then shows the test and how the statement evaluates. For example, here is a set of tasks and sample output:
.. code-block:: yaml
- name: check value of return code
ansible.builtin.debug:
var: bar_status.rc
- name: check test for rc value as string
ansible.builtin.debug:
var: bar_status.rc == "127"
- name: check test for rc value as integer
ansible.builtin.debug:
var: bar_status.rc == 127
.. code-block:: ansible-output
TASK [check value of return code] *********************************************************************************
ok: [foo-1] => {
"bar_status.rc": "127"
}
TASK [check test for rc value as string] **************************************************************************
ok: [foo-1] => {
"bar_status.rc == \"127\"": false
}
TASK [check test for rc value as integer] *************************************************************************
ok: [foo-1] => {
"bar_status.rc == 127": true
}
.. _commonly_used_facts:
Commonly-used facts

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