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TOPIC: PLAYBOOK

Using inventory files with Ansible

28th October 2022

This is the second post on Ansible following my main system's upgrade to Linux Mint 21. Then, I manually ran some Ansible playbooks, only to spot messages that I had not noticed before. Here, I discuss two messages issued because of an issue with an inventory file, which is where one defines lists of servers against which playbooks are executed. The default is called hosts and is located at /etc/ansible, but the system upgrade had renamed the existing one, which meant that Ansible could not find it. The solution was to take a copy and put somewhere safer. Then, I needed to add the location of the new file to the affected ansible-playbook commands using the following construct:

ansible-playbook [playbook path] -i [inventory file path]

Before I did this, I was seeing messages including the text "Could not match supplied host pattern" or others with the following text:

[WARNING]: No inventory was parsed, only implicit localhost is available

[WARNING]: provided hosts list is empty, only localhost is available. Note that the implicit localhost does not match 'all'

The cause was the same in each case, and attending to the inventory file got rid of the unwanted messages. The new file also should not be affected by system upgrades in the future.

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