Meta: Refresh_Inventory does not respect When conditions and will always run.

[ghost]

ISSUE TYPE

• Bug Report

COMPONENT NAME

meta: refresh_inventory

ANSIBLE VERSION

2.4.3

CONFIGURATION

OS / ENVIRONMENT

Running from Ubuntu 16.04 control machine talking to AWS.

SUMMARY

The meta: refresh_inventory does not respect a when condition and will always run regardless of the when condition.

STEPS TO REPRODUCE

 - name: test
    debug: msg="yes"
    when: web|changed

  - name: Refresh Inventory
    meta: refresh_inventory
    when: web|changed

EXPECTED RESULTS

For the refresh_inventory to respect the when condition and only run when it's required.

ACTUAL RESULTS

TASK [test] *************************************************************************task path: /mnt/c/Users/sarli_q5dr3em/projects/ansible-ptvgui/playbooks/aws_selenium_ec2appservers_lin.yml:55
skipping: [localhost] => {
    "changed": false,
    "skip_reason": "Conditional result was False"
}
setting up inventory plugins
Set default localhost to localhost
Parsed /mnt/c/Users/sarli_q5dr3em/projects/ansible-ptvgui/inventory/devaws/base inventory source with ini plugin
Parsed /mnt/c/Users/sarli_q5dr3em/projects/ansible-ptvgui/inventory/devaws/ec2.py inventory source with script plugin
META: inventory successfully refreshed
META: ran handlers
META: ran handlers

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[bcoca]

Possible Misunderstanding

Hi!

Thanks very much for your submission to Ansible. It sincerely means a lot to us.

This has been documented as the 'when' would be conditional to a specific host and the refresh is global. This is true for some of the 'meta' actions as they trigger changes into the engine itself, please see the docs for more details. https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/modules/meta_module.html

In the future, this might be a topic more well suited for the user list, which you can also post here if you'd like some more help with the above.

• https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/ansible-project

Thank you once again for this and your interest in Ansible!