False positive: ansible-lint reports [ANSIBLE0002] Trailing whitespace when there are none

The problem

When running ansible-lint on a Ansible role, it reported [ANSIBLE0002] Trailing whitespace on every line in one of my task files, like shown in the example below:


(vansible23)[audun@hostname my-role]$ ansible-lint .
[ANSIBLE0002] Trailing whitespace
/home/audun/git/my-role/tasks/main.yml:1
---
[ANSIBLE0002] Trailing whitespace
/home/audun/git/my-role/tasks/main.yml:2

[ANSIBLE0002] Trailing whitespace
/home/audun/git/my-role/tasks/main.yml:3
- debug: msg="Hello World"

The investigation

I had a suspicion there might be hidden characters in the file, but before running it through a HEX editor, I tried to check it with the Linux file command:


(vansible23)[audun@hostname my-role]$ file /home/audun/git/my-role/tasks/main.yml
/home/audun/git/my-role/tasks/main.yml: ASCII text, with CRLF line terminators


As shown above, it turned out that the file had CRLF line terminators on every line, indicating that this file had been created on Windows. That was luckily easy to fix.

The solution

The dos2unix command was used to change the file to Unix format:


(vansible23)[audun@hostname my-role]$ dos2unix /home/audun/git/my-role/tasks/main.yml
dos2unix: converting file /home/audun/git/my-role/tasks/main.yml to Unix format ...


Afterwards ansible-lint reported no issues:


(vansible23)[audun@hostname my-role]$ ansible-lint .

Customize Fedora 25 in a few minutes using Ansible

Instead of spending a few hours after installing Fedora 25 on adding the software you want and tweaking the options you prefer, why not use Ansible to get you up and running in minutes?

I assume you have already downloaded Fedora 25 Workstation from the official site at https://getfedora.org/, and that you have installed it, and that your personal user is allowed to run sudo (hint: being a member of the wheel group).


After logon to Fedora 25, download my Ansible playbook sample from https://github.com/avnes/blogsamples/blob/master/fedora.yml 

The rest of this article assumes you saved the file to ~/fedora.yml

Open ~/fedora.yml in a text editor (for instance vi or Gedit) and have look at what software it is installing, and what software it removes. Change it if you like.

When you are ready to play, run the following commands as your personal user:
sudo dnf install -y ansible
ansible-playbook ~/fedora.yml --connection=local --ask-become-pass

When promoted for a password, type in your personal password, and the playbook will then be executed with sudo rights. Both the sudo command and the ansible.playbook command will prompt you for your personal password.

Afterwards you should see a similar output as below, though changed would be higher than 0. In my case of is 0 because I have already run the playbook a few times already, so no changes.