Ansible playbook failure notifications to your phone.

Why Nerve for Ansible

Ansible playbooks that run from cron, CI, or AWX can fail silently. A changed SSH key, a package mirror outage, or a task timeout — and your infrastructure drifts. Nerve sends a push the moment a run exits non-zero.

Shell wrapper (simplest)

#!/bin/bash
set -euo pipefail
export NERVE_DSN="nerve://TOKEN:[email protected]"

if ansible-playbook -i inventory.yml site.yml 2>&1 | tee /tmp/ansible-output.log; then
  echo "Ansible OK: site.yml" | nerve send
else
  echo "ANSIBLE FAILED: site.yml" | nerve send --severity critical
  tail -20 /tmp/ansible-output.log | nerve send --severity alert
fi

Ansible handler (in-playbook)

Use a rescue block to catch failures inside the playbook itself.

---
- hosts: webservers
  tasks:
    - block:
        - name: Deploy application
          ansible.builtin.shell: /opt/deploy.sh
        - name: Restart service
          ansible.builtin.systemd:
            name: my-app
            state: restarted
      rescue:
        - name: Notify Nerve on failure
          ansible.builtin.shell: |
            echo "Ansible FAILED on {{ inventory_hostname }}: {{ ansible_failed_task.name }}" \
              | nerve send --severity critical
          environment:
            NERVE_DSN: "{{ nerve_dsn }}"
          delegate_to: localhost

Callback plugin approach

For broad coverage, use Ansible's callback system to notify on any play failure.

# ansible.cfg
[defaults]
callback_whitelist = nerve_notify

# In your callback plugin or wrapper:
# Check PLAY_RECAP for unreachable/failed hosts
ansible-playbook site.yml 2>&1 | tee /tmp/ansible.log
FAILED=$(grep -c "failed=" /tmp/ansible.log | grep -v "failed=0" || true)
if [ -n "$FAILED" ]; then
  grep "failed=" /tmp/ansible.log | nerve send --severity critical
fi

Scheduled runs (cron)

# /etc/cron.d/ansible-nightly
30 2 * * * ansible /usr/local/bin/ansible-with-nerve.sh

GitHub Actions + Ansible

- name: Run Ansible
  id: ansible
  run: ansible-playbook -i inventory.yml site.yml
  continue-on-error: true

- name: Notify on failure
  if: steps.ansible.outcome == 'failure'
  env:
    NERVE_DSN: ${{ secrets.NERVE_DSN }}
  run: echo "Ansible FAILED: ${{ github.repository }}" | nerve send --severity critical

Quick start

go install github.com/nerve-ink/nerve-cli/cmd/nerve@latest
export NERVE_DSN="nerve://TOKEN:[email protected]"
echo "Ansible FAILED: site.yml (3 hosts unreachable)" | nerve send --severity critical

FAQ