Help: Autogenerating Ansible Inventory advice

[Joaquin Menchaca]

Hello. 

I wanted to do host base configuration using hostname, and then dynamically populating inventory file with appropriate guest SSH port and private key path.

Vagrant Ansible Provisioner doesn't work if you rely on it to auto-generate the inventory file, as it uses 127.0.0.1 for hostname.  For example, it'll create a file /path/to/vagrant/.vagrant/provisioners/ansible/inventory/:

default ansible_ssh_host=127.0.0.1 ansible_ssh_port=2200 ansible_ssh_private_key_file=/path/to/vagrantdir/.vagrant/machines/default/virtualbox/private_key

I tried experimenting retrieving values (newbie working with vagrant ruby code), testing something like

  puts "config.ssh.private_key_path=#{config.ssh.private_key_path}"
  puts "config.ssh.guest_port=#{config.ssh.guest_port}"

But his returns objects, and I am not sure what to do.  Any suggestions?

[Alvaro Miranda Aguilera]

Hello

Can you check these examples?

Since they don't require anything special:

# Enable provisioning with Ansible.
config.vm.provision "ansible" do |ansible|
ansible.playbook = "provisioning/main.yml"
end


https://github.com/geerlingguy/ansible-vagrant-examples/blob/master/docker/Vagrantfile

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[Joaquin Menchaca]

This requires editing the local system's hosts files.  I am trying to avoid that scenario and create a Vagrant + Ansible environment that works on any system (no hosts file needed) w/o need for root access, and I wanted to plug in the appropriate information to simulate a real world environment where users would have a DNS server that correspond to the inventory file.  To do this, I wanted to custom generate an inventory file on the fly, using the current ssh configuration.

My Vagrant would look something like this:

  config.vm.hostname = "wheezybox"
  config.vm.provision :ansible do |ansible|
    ansible.playbook = "../../provisioning/playbook.yml"
   #  ansible.inventory_path = "../../provisioning/inventory.ini"
   ansible.sudo = true
  end

I would like to have code before the # comment. 

In deep diving into Vagrant 1.7.4 code, I can see there's some machine.ssh_info, but I don't know how to get at this. 

[Simon McCartney]

If you’re dealing with multiple-VMs and you know the IP’s you want to use inside the config block, you can use Ruby to create your inventory file for you:

      File.open('myInventory' , 'a') do |f|

        f.write "#{hostname} ansible_ssh_host=#{private_ip} ansible_ssh_user=vagrant ansible_ssh_private_key_file=~/.vagrant.d/insecure_private_key\n"

      end

This will generate inventory lines to match your config: 

head0001 ansible_ssh_host=10.16.0.201 ansible_ssh_user=vagrant ansible_ssh_private_key_file=~/.vagrant.d/insecure_private_key

More complete example here (in particular, using a hash to clearly map & generate names & IPs):

Vagrantfile: https://gist.github.com/d669ada085e50fd64bd7

resulting inventory file: https://gist.github.com/474c1d6a0e759611e29e

Proof that it all works (: https://gist.github.com/6a32603b9a21974f8078 (outside vagrant: https://gist.github.com/f1c91b95b7cbe80e1624)

https://github.com/simonmcc/multi-vm-ansible

HTH,

Simon.

-- 
Simon McCartney
+447710836915

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[Joaquin Menchaca]

Simon.  I must say I really like this one, I may use this idea in the future.

My req for this one is a single system, but I may have separate Vagrant directories per distro/version (wheezy, precise, centos6).  I could then handcraft the inventory, just like you did, but need to at least feed in the values from the Vagrantfile, but not sure how to use their library.

In looking through the Vagrant's code, it seems the values are write-only?  It has Vagrant.configure(version, &block), which later I guess parses and sets appropriately outside of this block.  This gives me an idea, if I just manually set the port, I can then refer to it elsewhere.