Displaying output of a remote command with Ansible

Question

In an Ansible role I generate the user's SSH key. After that I want to print it to the screen and pause so the user can copy and paste it somewhere else. So far I have something like this:

- name: Generate SSH keys for vagrant user
  user: name=vagrant generate_ssh_key=yes ssh_key_bits=2048
- name: Show SSH public key
  command: /bin/cat $home_directory/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
- name: Wait for user to copy SSH public key
  pause: prompt="Please add the SSH public key above to your GitHub account"

The 'Show SSH public key' task completes but doesn't show the output.

TASK: [Show SSH public key] *************************************************** 
changed: [default]

There may be a better way of going about this. I don't really like the fact that it will always show a 'changed' status. I did find this pull request for ansible - https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/2673 - but not sure if I can use it without writing my own module.

Answer 1

I'm not sure about the syntax of your specific commands (e.g., vagrant, etc), but in general...

Just register Ansible's (not-normally-shown) JSON output to a variable, then display each variable's stdout_lines attribute:

- name: Generate SSH keys for vagrant user
  user: name=vagrant generate_ssh_key=yes ssh_key_bits=2048
  register: vagrant
- debug: var=vagrant.stdout_lines

- name: Show SSH public key
  command: /bin/cat $home_directory/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
  register: cat
- debug: var=cat.stdout_lines

- name: Wait for user to copy SSH public key
  pause: prompt="Please add the SSH public key above to your GitHub account"
  register: pause
- debug: var=pause.stdout_lines