How to handle dynamic inventories with playbooks

[Samnang Sen]

We pull our server inventory from a Netscaler. Servers that are binded to a specific LB group is considered active and we deploy code and/or restart services at when needed. I've written a Python script that outputs the hosts into JSON format for Ansible to work with. This works fine except I'm at a lost as to how I can handle multiple environments. 

It could be the way I output the JSON because I query for ALL servers across the three environments we have (stagec, stagef and prod). Do I need a separate script for each environment in order to generate a "web" group for a particular environment? In my "restart.yml" file, you'll notice I intend to run the task against the server group called "webs."

A simple task to restart Apache on just the web servers:

# restart.yml

- name: Graceful restarts on web servers

  hosts: webs

  remote_user: deployment

  sudo_user: deployment

  gather_facts: no

  roles:

  - { role: restarts }

# roles/restarts/tasks/main.yml

- name: Restart web servers

  command: sudo /usr/local/apache/bin/apachectl restart

Here's the JSON output from my inventory script:

{

    "stagec-webs": {

        "hosts": [

            "webstage3",

            "webstage4"

        ]

    },

   "stagec-perl": {

        "hosts": [

            "perlstage3",

            "perlstage4"

        ]

    },

   "stagef-webs": {

        "hosts": [

            "webstage9",

            "webstage5",

            "webstage1",

            "webstage2"            

        ]

    },

}

[benno joy]

you could just have - hosts: all and call the playbook via --limit stagec-webs,

or let your script read a parameter from a file or environement variable which specifies the environment you want the inventory to be generated and only generate the inventory for that specific environment.

- Benno

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