vagrant/ansible - Unexpected Exception ascii

vagrant/ansible - Unexpected Exception: ascii

When you ever see a weird message like:

==> client: Running provisioner: ansible_local...
client: Running ansible-playbook...
to see the full traceback, use -vvv
ERROR! Unexpected Exception: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2018' in position 10: ordinal not in range(128)
Ansible failed to complete successfully. Any error output should be
visible above. Please fix these errors and try again.

Then do not try thousand of different things with the YAML files, but inspect the content of the YAML files with cat -v for some non-ascii characters. It can save you hours of troubleshooting!

$ cat -v create_users.yml
---
# File: ansible/common/roles/rear-test/tasks/create_users.yml

- name: Generate password
  shell: python -c M-bM-^@M-^Ximport crypt; print crypt.crypt("vagrant", "$1$SomeSalt$")'
  register: genpass

As you can see in the above shell line the quote was a bad copy/paste from my side. Replaced it with a correct quote and the problem was fixed.

Happy debugging, Gratien