Using check mode

Although you might be confident in the code you have written, it still pays to test it before running it for real in a production environment. In such cases, it is a good idea to be able to run your code, but with a safety net in place. This is what check mode is for. Follow these steps:

1. First of all, we need to create an easy playbook to test this feature. Let’s create a playbook called check-mode.yaml that contains the following content:

   ---
   - hosts: localhost
     tasks:
     - name: Touch a file
       ansible.builtin.file:
         path: /tmp/myfile
         state: touch

2. Now, we can run the playbook in check mode by specifying the --check option in the invocation:

   $ ansible-playbook check-mode.yaml --check

This will output everything as if it were really performing the operation, as follows:

PLAY [localhost] *******************************************...