In 2.0, when is the inventory read and the special "groups" variable populated?

[Michael Baydoun]

Our playbooks set facts similar to

- name: illustrate problem

  set_fact:

    monitoringServer: "{{ groups.nagios.0 }}"

In 1.9.x that would evaluate to the first server in the nagios group in inventory

In 2.0, groups doesn't contain a value for nagios, or any other inventory group.  It only contains "all" and "ungrouped", both of which contain localhost.

 

[Brian Coca]

That should only happen if you are using no inventory, the internal
fallback is to create a 'localhost' entry which defaults to those
groups.




--
Brian Coca

[Michael Baydoun]

Thanks for the tip.  Some code that managed .ansible.cfg was misbehaving and changing the default inventory file unexpectedly.