Topics

- Inventory Plugins
  - Enabling Inventory Plugins
  - Using Inventory Plugins
  - Plugin List

# Inventory Plugins

Inventory plugins allow users to point at data sources to compile the inventory of hosts that Ansible uses to target tasks, either via the `-i /path/to/file` and/or `-i 'host1, host2'` command line parameters or from other configuration sources.

## Enabling Inventory Plugins

Most inventory plugins shipped with Ansible are disabled by default and need to be whitelisted in your ansible.cfg file in order to function. This is how the default whitelist looks in the config file that ships with Ansible:

    [inventory]
    enable_plugins = host_list, script, yaml, ini, auto

This list also establishes the order in which each plugin tries to parse an inventory source. Any plugins left out of the list will not be considered, so you can ‘optimize’ your inventory loading by minimizing it to what you actually use. For example:

    [inventory]
    enable_plugins = advanced_host_list, constructed, yaml

## Using Inventory Plugins

The only requirement for using an inventory plugin after it is enabled is to provide an inventory source to parse. Ansible will try to use the list of enabled inventory plugins, in order, against each inventory source provided. Once an inventory plugin succeeds at parsing a source, any remaining inventory plugins will be skipped for that source.

To start using an inventory plugin with a YAML configuration source, create a file with the accepted filename schema for the plugin in question, then add `plugin: plugin_name`. Each plugin documents any naming restrictions. For example, the aws_ec2 inventory plugin:

    # demo.aws_ec2.yml
    plugin: aws_ec2

Or for the openstack plugin:

    # clouds.yml
    plugin: openstack

The `auto` inventory plugin is enabled by default and works by using the `plugin` field to indicate the plugin that should attempt to parse it. You can configure the whitelist/precedence of inventory plugins used to parse source using the ansible.cfg [‘inventory’] `enable_plugins` list. After enabling the plugin and providing any required options you can view the populated inventory with `ansible-inventory -i demo.aws_ec2.yml --graph`:

    @all:
      |--@aws_ec2:
      |  |--ec2-12-345-678-901.compute-1.amazonaws.com
      |  |--ec2-98-765-432-10.compute-1.amazonaws.com
      |--@ungrouped:

You can set the default inventory path (via `inventory` in the ansible.cfg [defaults] section or the `ANSIBLE_HOSTS` environment variable) to your inventory source(s). Now running `ansible-inventory --graph` should yield the same output as when you passed your YAML configuration source(s) directly. You can add custom inventory plugins to your plugin path to use in the same way.

Your inventory source might be a directory of inventory configuration files. The constructed inventory plugin only operates on those hosts already in inventory, so you may want the constructed inventory configuration parsed at a particular point (such as last). Ansible parses the directory recursively, alphabetically. You cannot configure the parsing approach, so name your files to make it work predictably. Inventory plugins that extend constructed features directly can work around that restriction by adding constructed options in addition to the inventory plugin options. Otherwise, you can use `-i` with multiple sources to impose a specific order, e.g. `-i demo.aws_ec2.yml -i clouds.yml -i constructed.yml`.

You can create dynamic groups using host variables with the constructed `keyed_groups` option. The option `groups` can also be used to create groups and `compose` creates and modifies host variables. Here is an aws_ec2 example utilizing constructed features:

    # demo.aws_ec2.yml
    plugin: aws_ec2
    regions:
      - us-east-1
      - us-east-2
    keyed_groups:
      # add hosts to tag_Name_value groups for each aws_ec2 host's tags.Name variable
      - key: tags.Name
        prefix: tag_Name_
        separator: ""
    groups:
      # add hosts to the group development if any of the dictionary's keys or values is the word 'devel'
      development: "'devel' in (tags|list)"
    compose:
      # set the ansible_host variable to connect with the private IP address without changing the hostname
      ansible_host: private_ip_address

Now the output of `ansible-inventory -i demo.aws_ec2.yml --graph`:

    @all:
      |--@aws_ec2:
      |  |--ec2-12-345-678-901.compute-1.amazonaws.com
      |  |--ec2-98-765-432-10.compute-1.amazonaws.com
      |  |--...
      |--@development:
      |  |--ec2-12-345-678-901.compute-1.amazonaws.com
      |  |--ec2-98-765-432-10.compute-1.amazonaws.com
      |--@tag_Name_ECS_Instance:
      |  |--ec2-98-765-432-10.compute-1.amazonaws.com
      |--@tag_Name_Test_Server:
      |  |--ec2-12-345-678-901.compute-1.amazonaws.com
      |--@ungrouped

If a host does not have the variables in the configuration above (i.e. `tags.Name`, `tags`, `private_ip_address`), the host will not be added to groups other than those that the inventory plugin creates and the `ansible_host` host variable will not be modified.

## Plugin List

You can use `ansible-doc -t inventory -l` to see the list of available plugins. Use `ansible-doc -t inventory <plugin name>` to see plugin-specific documentation and examples.

See also

About Playbooks
  An introduction to playbooks
Callback Plugins
  Ansible callback plugins
Connection Plugins
  Ansible connection plugins
Filters
  Jinja2 filter plugins
Tests
  Jinja2 test plugins
Lookups
  Jinja2 lookup plugins
Vars Plugins
  Ansible vars plugins
User Mailing List
  Have a question? Stop by the google group!
irc.freenode.net
  #ansible IRC chat channel