Finding Hosts on Ansible Inventories
Posted 3 years ago in
title: Finding Hosts on Ansible Inventories
published: true description: tags: quickfix, protips, ansible, devops
I tend to work with a bunch of different servers when writing and testing tutorials. Even though I always organize my nodes into groups and give them alias to facilitate running commands and playbooks, it still gets a bit chaotic. I found myself having to open or cat the contents of my Ansible inventory many times a day to get IP addresses of servers I knew only by alias name.
I tried to find a native, neat way to get this info, but I couldn't. This is what I came up with :)
alias inventory="cat /etc/ansible/hosts | grep $1"
Now whenever I need to get the IP from a host in my Ansible inventory, I just run:
$ inventory mysql
And this is the kind of output I get:
[mysqlservers]
mysql1 ansible_host=165.22.254.246
Just remember to include the alias in your .basrc (or .zshrc if you use Zsh like me) file so the alias is preserved.