In this short blog post, I will show you how to create a new Ansible inventory file and add hosts into.
Inventory
By default, Ansible comes with an inventory file called hosts that is located in the following path on the server you install Ansible. The file also shows us how to group hosts.
/etc/ansible/hosts
Create a new Inventory
To create a new inventory file, I can either create in the /etc/ansible or somewhere also. Let’s create a new inventory file addcservers which will hold my Windows domain controllers. In my case, I will use the nano text editor.
nano addcservers
The inventory file will look like:
[dc] 192.168.0.110 192.168.0.111 [dc:vars] ansible_user=ansible ansible_password=password ansible_connection=winrm ansible_winrm_transport=ntlm ansible_winrm_server_cert_validation=ignore
To test that the inventory file is working OK, I will use a ping test as shown below. Just note that because I have Windows hosts, I use the win_ping module. If your managed hosts are Linux use ping.
ansible dc -i addcservers -m win_ping
If you have a playbook that you would like to run the inventory file on using the following command (-i and the path to the file).
ansible-playbook -i addcservers file.yaml