Passing hosts as a variable to a playbook

[KSS]

Hi,

I'm attempting to pass a host as a variable to a playbook, but this simply results in "skipping: no hosts matched".

# ansible --version

ansible 1.9.0.1

------------- Playbook ---------------

# cat kstest.yml

---

- hosts: '{{ myhost }}'

  tasks:

     - name: testing on '{{ myhost }}'

       debug: msg="host is {{myhost}}"

------------- Playbook run -----------

# ansible-playbook ./kstest.yml -e "myhost=123.12.12.1" -vvvv

PLAY [123.12.12.1] ************************************************************

skipping: no hosts matched

PLAY RECAP ********************************************************************

If I do a list-hosts, it expands the variable as the play name but shows a zero host count;

# ansible-playbook ./kstest.yml -e "myhost=123.12.12.1" --list-hosts

playbook: ./kstest.yml

  play #1 (123.12.12.1): host count=0

I get exactly the same issue with ansible version 1.8.4.

Looking around the group and googling shows a number of playbooks using the same method as above so I presume it did work this way at some point unless I'm doing something wrong that I just can't see.

Can anyone see anything obviously wrong or know why passing the host as an extra variable on the command line doesn't work?

I can work around it by using the trick of passing a host directly to the inventory option  -i 'myhost,', but it seems this trick is something that could possibly be removed and isn't supposed to be used.

[Brian Coca]

the host still needs to exist in the inventory





--
Brian Coca

[KSS]

Understood. Great, thanks.