Error recovery

While error conditions can be narrowly defined, there will be times when real errors happen. Ansible provides a method to react to true errors, a method that allows running additional tasks when an error occurs, defining specific tasks that always execute even if there was an error, or even both. This method is the block feature.

The blocks feature, introduced with Ansible version 2.0, provides some additional structure to related sets of play task. Blocks can group tasks together into a logical unit, which can have task controls applied to the unit (or block) as a whole. In addition, a block of tasks can have optional rescue and always sections, which execute on condition of an error and regardless of the error state, respectively. We will explore how these work in the following two sections.

Using the rescue section

The rescue section of a block defines a logical unit of tasks that will be executed...