Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server Cookbook

Configuring the Ansible inventory

The Ansible inventory is the heart of the product as it provides a lot of variables about your environment to the deployment mechanism. These variables are known as facts and serve Ansible to make decisions, template text-based files, and so on.

How to do it…

There are several ways of adding information about your environment to your inventory.

The static inventory file

The static inventory is basically a mini-formatted file containing the definitions for hosts and groups. Here's what you need to do:

1. Create /etc/ansible/hosts with the following contents:

   ~]# cat << EOF >> /etc/ansible/hosts
   localhost         ansible_connection=local
   srv1.domain.tld   ansible_connection=ssh ansible_ssh_user=root
   
   [mail]
   mail[01..50].domain.tld ...