Building Inventories & Running Ad Hoc Commands

Official Docs

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An inventory is a list of managed nodes, or hosts, that Ansible deploys and configures.

Create an inventory file

nano inventory

Within the file add the IPs to be configured

10.10.30.10
10.10.30.20
10.10.30.30

Add the inventory file to version control

git add inventory

Commit the changes

git commit -m "first version of the inventory file, added three hosts."

Push commit to Github

git push origin master

Test Ansible is working

ansible all --key-file ~/.ssh/ansible -i inventory -m ping
# -i INVETORY 
# -m MODULE_NAME (action to execute, in this case the ping command) - note that `ping` here is an actual ssh connection. Not a normal ping command.

• This command will send a ping to all the hosts inside the inventory file
• If successful, this should return something like:

  10.10.30.20 | SUCCESS => {
    "ansible_facts": {
        "discovered_interpreter_python": "/usr/bin/python3"
    },
    "changed": false,
    "ping": "pong"
}

Create ansible config file

Inside your repository directory:

nano ansible.cfg

[defaults]
inventory = inventory 
private_key_file = ~/.ssh/ansible

Now the ansible command can be simplified

ansible all -m ping

List all of the hosts in the inventory

ansible all --list-hosts

Gather facts about your hosts

ansible all -m gather_facts

This will be very long. You can search for something specific by filtering with grep

Gather facts about your hosts, but limit it to just one host

ansible all -m gather_facts --limit 172.16.250.132