Anytime I would typically be reaching for a shell script of medium to long length, it's typically easier to maintain in Ansible.
But, if I find my Ansible is getting rather long, I need to do things more complicated than simple loops, or there isn't an Ansible primitive to interact with the system I'm working with... time to start reaching for an actual programming language like Python or Go.
I gravitated to Ansible because it was language independent, simple to translate line-by-line scripts and didn't require an on server agent to work. Knowing that I could invest into Ansible and take it with me anywhere that I had SSH access was very motivating.
It's not perfect, but it's so much better than my previous experiences that I won't complain about the pain points too loudly.
- create virtual env
- activate and install pip packages
- run command using that environment
I don't have a copy of any of our playbooks on this as I'm at home and it's late. But it's basically just a couple of tasks.
Check out `ansible.builtin.pip` to setup and install the virtualenv and then just call `ansible.builtin.command` to run it explicitly. Implicit use of the venv can be accomplished via common task argument `env` which also lets one fiddle with PATH.