How to see stdout of ansible commands?

Solution 1:

I think you can register the result to a variable, then print with debug.

- name: print to stdout
  command: echo "hello"
  register: hello

- debug: msg="{{ hello.stdout }}"

- debug: msg="{{ hello.stderr }}"

Solution 2:

Instead of stdout I would suggest using stdout_lines. For multiline output this is much nicer, e.g.

- hosts: all
  tasks:
    - name: Run ls.sh and output "ls /"
      script: ls.sh
      register: out

    - debug: var=out.stdout_lines

gives

TASK: [debug var=out.stdout_lines] ******************************************** 
ok: [local] => {
    "var": {
        "out.stdout_lines": [
            "total 61", 
            "lrwxrwxrwx   1 root root     7 Feb 15  2015 bin -> usr/bin", 
            "drwxr-xr-x   6 root root  1024 Aug 24 22:08 boot", 
            "drwxr-xr-x  22 root root  3580 Sep  8 18:41 dev",  
            [...] 
            "drwxr-xr-x   9 root root  4096 Aug 25 19:14 usr", 
            "drwxr-xr-x  13 root root  4096 Feb 25  2015 var"
        ]
    }
}

Regarding real time output for debugging purposes there is a closed bug report https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/3887#issuecomment-54672569 discussing the reasons why this is not possible and will not be implemented.