Ansible Inventory File Options

1 min read

Tags

Inventory file or folder

    inventory = ~/.ansible/hosts

Inventory path can be a folder or a file.

As a file you have everything withing a single file.


    localhost ansible_connection=local

    [jenkinsgroup]
    jenkins

    [webgroup]
    web01 php_version='7.1'

    [demogroup:children]
    jenkinsgroup
    webgroup

As a folder you can make many inventory files for grouping

    ~/.ansible/hosts/mpp_hosts
    ~/.ansible/hosts/demo_hosts

    [jenkinsgroup]
    jenkins

    [webgroup]
    web01 php_version='7.1'

    [demogroup:children]
    jenkinsgroup
    webgroup

Local ansible.cfg

In your the local folder for your playbook you can create a local config file.

path_to_playbook/ansible.cfg

    [defaults]
    inventory = inventory
    # additional paths to search for roles in, colon separated
    roles_path = ~/.ansible/roles

    # uncomment this to disable SSH key host checking
    #host_key_checking = False
    display_skipped_hosts = no
    display_ok_hosts = yes
    # change the default callback, you can only have one 'stdout' type enabled at a time.
    stdout_callback = default
    vault_password_file = ~/.ansible/vault-password

    [ssh_connection]
    # Enabling pipelining reduces the number of SSH operations required to
    # execute a module on the remote server. This can result in a significant
    # performance improvement when enabled, however when using "sudo:" you must
    # first disable 'requiretty' in /etc/sudoers
    #
    # By default, this option is disabled to preserve compatibility with
    # sudoers configurations that have requiretty (the default on many distros).
    #
    pipelining = true

Then make an inventory file for the localized hosts.

Dynamic inventory with DigitalOcean

Copy these two files to your inventory path i.e. inventory = ~/.ansible/hosts digital_ocean.py and digital_ocean.ini

Update digital_ocean.ini with your API Key from your account. Using tags on your droplets you can make groups and custom variables in your inventory file.

    ls ~/.ansible/hosts
    digital_ocean_hosts
    digital_ocean.ini
    digital_ocean.py

digital_ocean_hosts content using tags: web, client, php71 and php72. php_version is used in Ansible Role: PHP Versions by geerlingguy

    [web:vars]
    ansible_port="7822"
    ansible_user="sudouser"

    [php71:vars]
    php_version="7.1"

    [php72:vars]
    php_version="7.2"

    [client:vars]
    ansible_port="22"
    ansible_user="sudouser"