Tier 1 — pre-step skip conditions:
when: <remote shell expr> skip unless expr exits 0
creates: <remote path> skip if path already exists
removes: <remote path> skip if path is already absent
Any of the three saying "skip" marks the step `skipped` and moves on.
Evaluated under bash -c on the remote so `!`, `[[`, pipes etc. behave
consistently regardless of the default remote shell.
Tier 2 — post-step change detection:
changed_when: <remote shell expr>
Evaluated after a successful step. Exit 0 → step counts as `changed`
(default). Exit != 0 → `ok` (ran, nothing actually different).
Without this field, successful steps default to `changed`, matching
Ansible's shell/command defaults. Useful on verify steps:
`changed_when: "false"` reports them as `ok` since they only attest.
Status model moved from pass/fail to four states:
ok / changed / failed / skipped
Summary reports each count; overall outcome is CHANGED if any step
changed, OK if none did, FAILED on any non-skipped failure.
Rerunnable smoke: playbooks/elway-smoke.yaml now proves it. On a
clean target the cold run reports 4 changed, 3 ok. Rerunning with
the same vars reports 2 skipped / 2 changed (upload + log-record
have no idempotency hooks and are always `changed`). Overriding
--var greeting=... re-runs the gated step exactly as intended.
Doc block at the top of the script updated with the new schema
fields and state machine.
`scripts/elway` is a ~600-line Python tool (stdlib + python3-yaml) for
driving one-off ssh commands, ad-hoc file uploads, and YAML playbooks
against a single host. Fills the gap between "single ssh one-liner"
and "reach for Ansible."
Highlights:
- Three invocation modes: --shell, --upload (LOCAL:REMOTE[:MODE]),
and --playbook <path>
- Playbook schema: inline vars, list of steps, optional verify block.
Template via {{ var }}; CLI --var overrides inline defaults
- stop_on_fail global (default on), per-step override. Verify phase
always runs, even after a halt — you see end-state regardless
- Sudo handled once: probes NOPASSWD; if not, prompts locally via
getpass, validates up-front, then feeds via `sudo -S` per step.
Password never written to disk/logs. Upload-with-sudo stages to
/tmp then sudo-mv + sudo-chmod
- SSH connection reuse via ControlMaster (60s persist) keeps
multi-step playbooks responsive (~30ms/step reuse vs ~550ms cold)
- Live interleaved stdout/stderr with per-step prefix and colored
pass/fail summary. --dry-run prints the plan without executing
- Shebang pinned to /usr/bin/python3 to bypass venv-shadowing
when python3-yaml lives in the system site-packages
Smoke test (playbooks/elway-smoke.yaml) covers vars + upload + verify;
drove out a YAML-scalar-coercion bug before first commit (`shell: false`
parsed to Python bool, crashed the templater — now coerced to string
at load time with a clear error on nulls).
vh