An Ansible inventory is a list of managed hosts in your infrastructure on which you run your automation tasks. Those managed hosts can be organized into groups that can be used to specify subsets of managed hosts on which you run particular plays. The inventory can also be used to define host and group variables that apply to those hosts and are used by your plays.

With ansible-navigator, you might have defined your inventory in a text file, in either INI or YAML format, and then specified which inventory file to use on the command line or with an ansible.cfg file. The following is an example of an inventory file in INI format.

[production_servers]
prod1.example.com
prod2.example.com

[database_servers]
db_server01.example.com

[production_servers:vars]
apache_listen_port=8080
apache_root_path=/var/www/mywebdocs/

[all:vars]
ansible_user=student
ansible_ssh_private_key_file=/home/student/.ssh/id_rsa

In order to run automation jobs with automation controller, you must specify an inventory for the job. There are several ways to do this, including:

This section covers how to configure, inspect, and edit a static inventory using the automation controller web UI.

Automation controller manages inventories as objects. Each organization might have many inventories available. Users can create job templates and configure those job templates to use a specific inventory belonging to the organization. Access to an inventory object on the automation controller depends on the roles a user has been assigned for the inventory.

Creating Hosts in an Inventory

1. On the Group Details page, click Hosts and then click Add.

2. Select Add new host.

3. Enter a name and description for the new host in the Name and Description fields, respectively.

4. Click Save.

Figure 3.1: Inventory details

You can assign appropriate RBAC roles to users and teams for an inventory, in order to grant users the ability to read, use, or manage it.

Figure 3.2: User Roles

The following is a list of available roles for an inventory:

When you create an inventory, it is only accessible by users who have the Admin, Inventory Admin, or Auditor roles for the organization to which the inventory belongs. You have to configure access to all other users.

First, you need to create the inventory and save it, and after that, you can assign users and teams appropriate roles as discussed previously.

Ansible supports inventory variables that apply values to variables on particular hosts or host groups.

When you manage a static inventory in the Ansible automation controller web UI, you can define inventory variables directly in the inventory object.

On the Inventories page, set the variables by clicking the Edit inventory(pencil) icon next to the inventory name. On the Details page for the inventory, you can set variables that affect all hosts in the inventory:

Figure 3.3: Variables for all hosts

When creating a host group within an inventory, you can define the group variables using YAML or JSON in the Variables field on the Create new group page.

You can also set the group variables by clicking on the Edit group (pencil) icon next to the host group’s name in the inventory. These variables apply to all hosts that are part of the group:

Figure 3.4: Variables for a host group

Likewise, you can define the host variables using either YAML or JSON in the Variables field on the Create new host page when an individual host is created within an inventory. Alternatively, click the Edit host (pencil) icon next to the host name in the inventory to define the host variables. Variables defined in this manner only apply to the specific host.

Figure 3.5: Variables for an individual host