ansible-hosts.md

ansible-hosts

Purpose

Displays information on hosts from ansible-inventory.

Syntax

Syntax: ansible-hosts [-h] [-c] [-n] [-v] [hosts [hosts ...]]

Options and arguments

hosts is one or more regular expressions to select hosts. By default, all hosts are turned.

Option	Description	Default
-c, --commas	Join hosts with a comma. --name-only is also implied	Print all information in tabular form
-n, --names, -l, --list	List names only, not even a heading	Print host names one line at a time
-v	Enable verbose debugging	Debugging is not enabled

Example

$ ansible-hosts
host           ip              user      key
bruno-amazon1  3.83.98.175     ec2-user  /home/mrbruno/.ssh/bruno.pem
bruno-amazon2  100.25.192.145  ec2-user  /home/mrbruno/.ssh/bruno.pem
bruno-rh8      100.26.227.68   ec2-user  /home/mrbruno/.ssh/bruno.pem
$ ansible-hosts ama
host           ip              user      key
bruno-amazon1  3.83.98.175     ec2-user  /home/mrbruno/.ssh/bruno.pem
bruno-amazon2  100.25.192.145  ec2-user  /home/mrbruno/.ssh/bruno.pem
$ ansible-hosts --names
bruno-amazon1
bruno-amazon2
bruno-rh8
$ echo $(ansible-hosts --names)
bruno-amazon1 bruno-amazon2 bruno-rh8
$ ansible-hosts --commas
bruno-amazon1,bruno-amazon2,bruno-rh8
$

Making use of --commas

I often use --names or --commas when I'm using other tools. Running an Ansible adhoc command is a good example:

$ echo ansible $(ansible-hosts -c) -m command -a hostname
ansible bruno-amazon1,bruno-amazon2,bruno-rh8 -m command -a hostname
$ ansible $(ansible-hosts -c) -m command -a hostname
bruno-amazon1 | SUCCESS | rc=0 >>
ip-172-31-86-19

bruno-amazon2 | SUCCESS | rc=0 >>
ip-172-31-49-27.ec2.internal

bruno-rh8 | SUCCESS | rc=0 >>
ip-172-31-58-255.ec2.internal

$

Notes

• This assumes you have Ansible and an inventory file such as /etc/ansible/hosts that ansible-inventory can work with.