Question

An Ansible playbook manages a fleet of web servers. A team member added a task that runs a shell command to regenerate a config cache. Every playbook run reports this task as 'changed', even when nothing was actually modified, which triggers an unnecessary handler that restarts the web service. Which approach BEST makes this task idempotent so it only reports 'changed' when the cache is truly rebuilt?

Accepted Answer

Add a 'changed_when' condition to the shell task that evaluates the command's output or return code to reflect actual changes

Answer

Add 'ignore_errors: true' to the shell task so failures do not trigger the handler

Answer

Move the handler into the same task using 'notify' with 'listen' so it always fires last

Answer

Set 'gather_facts: false' at the play level to prevent Ansible from detecting changes