Question

What is Ansible Inventory and its types?

Answer 1

In Ansible, there are two types of inventory files: Static and Dynamic.

• Static inventory file is a list of managed hosts declared under a host group using either hostnames or IP addresses in a plain text file. The managed host entries are listed below the group name in each line. For example

[gatewayed]
staging1 ansible_host=10.0.2.1
staging2 ansible_host=10.0.2.2

• Dynamic inventory is generated by a script written in Python or any other programming language or by using plugins(preferable). In a cloud setup, static inventory file configuration will fail since IP addresses change once a virtual server is stopped and started again. We create a demo_aws_ec2.yaml file for the config such as

plugin: aws_ec2 regions:
ap-south-1 filters:
tag:tagtype: testing

Now we can fetch using this command

ansible-inventory -i demo_aws_ec2.yaml -graph