idempotence

Allowing Ansible playbooks to work with new user groups on first run

For a long time, I've had some Ansible playbooks—most notably ones that would install Docker then start some Docker containers—where I had to split them in two parts, or at least run them twice, because they relied on the control user having a new group assigned for some later tasks.

The problem is, Ansible would connect over SSH to a server, and use that connection for subsequent tasks. If you add a group to the user (e.g. docker), then keep running more tasks, that new group assignment won't be picked up until the SSH connection is reset (similar to how if you're logged in, you'd have to log out and log back in to see your new groups).

The easy fix for this? Add a reset_connection meta task in your play to force Ansible to drop its persistent SSH connection and reconnect to the server: