Trigger failure

There are cases when you want to trigger a failure directly. This can happen for multiple reasons, even if there are disadvantages doing so, since when you trigger the failure, the playbook will be brutally interrupted and this could leave your machine in an inconsistent state if you are not careful. One case where I have seen it work very well, is when you are running a non-idempotent playbook (for instance building of a newer version of an application) and you need a variable (for instance: the version/branch to deploy) set. In this case, you can check that the expected variable is correctly configured before starting to run the operations to ensure that everything will work as expected later on.

Let's put the following code in playbooks/maven_build.yaml:

    - hosts: j01.fale.io 
      tasks: 
      - name: Ensure the tag variable is properly set 
        fail: 'The version needs to be defined. To do...