Practical Network Automation

Working with Ansible facts

As we saw earlier, we can gather facts about a managed node using the following command:

ansible <hostname> -m setup

For example:

ansible localhost -m setup

Now, as we get the values back (called facts), we can refer to those system variables. Each system variable will hold a unique value based upon each of the managed node that was called under the hosts section:

- hosts: myrouters
  vars:
      mypath: "{{ base_path }}/etc"

The system variables can be called using the {{variable name}}, but in a playbook, they need to be referenced with double quotes.

Let us see an example where we get the value of hostname in our playbook:

- hosts: myrouters  tasks:    - debug: msg: "System {{ inventory_hostname }} has hostname as {{ ansible_nodename ...