How to run Ansible without hosts file

Question

How to run Ansible without hosts file?

just like:

$ ansible --"Some Options" IP  -a 'uptime'

score 36 · Accepted Answer · edited Aug 31 '17 at 04:40

36

you can do like this:

ansible all -i "<hostname-or-ip>," -a 'uptime'

Note the , at the end of the IP address, or it will be considered a hosts inventory filename.

Here is an example for reference:

ansible all -i "192.168.33.100," -a 'uptime'

192.168.33.100 | SUCCESS | rc=0 >>
 12:05:10 up 10 min,  1 user,  load average: 0.46, 0.23, 0.08

edited Aug 31 '17 at 04:40

haridsv

9,065
4
62
65

answered Jun 06 '16 at 08:35

Arbab Nazar

22,378
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1

That bloody comma cost me 10 minutes...Thank you so much. – Orca Jun 27 '20 at 14:25

score 8 · Answer 2 · edited Sep 19 '20 at 12:45

Hosts can be given to ansible using three ways

Using inventory path in ansible.cfg which is /etc/ansible/host by default
Using hosts file
```
 ansible -i /tmp/hosts -a 'uptime' all
```
Using hosts ip as comma separated host list. Take care of the comma in the end of the list
```
 ansible -i "192.168.1.16,192.168.1.80:2222," -a 'uptime' all
```

From ansible --help you can get -i option description

-i INVENTORY, --inventory-file=INVENTORY
                    specify inventory host path
                    (default=/etc/ansible/hosts) or comma separated host
                    list.

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 15 '17 at 15:53

0

If you want run playbook at once or some more and not whole list, you can try with -l|--limit "your.node.local"

ansible-playbook -i inventory.hosts --limit your.node.local user.yml

answered Feb 15 '17 at 15:53

cray

145
6

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Sep 19 '20 at 12:51

Both the answers here have most of what you need but in order to SSH to a remote host you need to tell ansible what user to SSH as, especially if it's different on the system you're running ansible from and the remote targets.

For example, I have 4 RPi4 systems with Ubuntu 20.04 on them. To access them with an Ansiible ad-hoc command:

$ ansible -i "k8s-02a,k8s-02b,k8s-02c,pi-vpn," -a uptime all -u ubuntu
pi-vpn | CHANGED | rc=0 >>
 12:47:26 up  7:52,  1 user,  load average: 0.14, 0.14, 0.10
k8s-02c | CHANGED | rc=0 >>
 12:47:27 up  7:58,  1 user,  load average: 0.06, 0.10, 0.09
k8s-02a | CHANGED | rc=0 >>
 12:47:27 up  7:58,  1 user,  load average: 0.43, 0.50, 0.47
k8s-02b | CHANGED | rc=0 >>
 12:47:27 up  7:58,  1 user,  load average: 0.08, 0.06, 0.04

Here I'm providing a list of my hostnames to -i and also directing ansible to use the username ubuntu.

NOTE: My ansible version:

$ ansible --version | grep ^ans
ansible 2.9.11

How to run Ansible without hosts file

4 Answers4

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