Get the pid of a running playbook for use within the playbook

Question

When we run a playbook, with verbose output enabled, in the ansible logs we can see something like this:

2016-02-03 12:51:58,235 p=4105 u=root | PLAY RECAP

Answer 1

You can define the PID for localhost using the set_fact module with a lookup filter.

- hosts: localhost
  tasks:
    - set_fact:
        pid: "{{ lookup('pipe', 'echo $PPID') }}"

And later on you can reference the PID via the hostvars dictionary.

- hosts: remote
  tasks:
    - debug: var=hostvars.localhost.pid