How can you set multiple hosts on the same machine with dynamic inventories

[ryangr...@outlook.com]

Hi,

I'm currently setting up two VMs that are accessible behind a single domain name but on different ports. I cannot figure 

out how to specifiy host-vars seperately for each host. My aim is to allow ansible to SSH into each of these machines; I'm not currently

using hostvars for anything else. 

If I had two machines accessible on different ports and different domains - example-1.com:22 and example-2.com:9001 - I would produce this dynamic inventory JSON output:

{
 "mymachines": {
 "hosts": [
 "example-1.com",
 "example-2.com"
 ],
 "hostvars": {
 "example-1.com": {
 "ansible_port": "22"
 },
 "example-2.com": {
 "ansible_port": "9001"
 }
 }
 }
}

However, there is no analogue for different hosts with the same domain name:

{
 "mymachines": {
 "hosts": [
 "example-0.com",
 "example-0.com",
 ],
 "hostvars": {
 "example-0.com": {
 "ansible_port": "22"
 },
 ??: {
 "ansible_port": "9001"
 }
 }
 }
}

I cannot specify the domain-names alongside their ports 

{
 "mymachines": {
 "hosts": [
 "example-0.com:22",
 "example-0.com:9001",
 ]
 }
}

as Ansible passes the entire host to OpenSSH without using the -p argument, which means the host never resolves. It seems 

to run code equivalent to the following 

 ssh foo@example-0.com:9001            # BAD

not 

 ssh foo@example-0.com -p 9001         # GOOD

Do you have any advice for how I can create a dynamic inventory that allows SSH access to machines with the same domain name

but different ports? I'll post more information if needed.

Thanks

[Matt Martz]

Just as with ini formatted inventories, if you want to use the same IP or hostname for 2 different "hosts", you need to create an alias for them, and specify the hostname using ansible_host (ansible_ssh_host for versions before v2)

An ini would look like:

host1 ansible_host=example-0.com ansible_port=22

host2 ansible_host=example-0.com ansible_port=9001

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Matt Martz
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[ryangr...@outlook.com]

Thanks for your (quick!) suggestion.  That worked perfectly, thank you. For reference by anyone reading this question, the working solution looks roughly like this:

{
    "example-1": {
        "vars": {
            "ansible_host": "example-1.com",
            "ansible_port": 5513
        },
        "hosts": [
            "unused-alias-1"
        ]
    },
    "example-2": {
        "vars": {
            "ansible_host": "example-2.com",
            "ansible_port": 22
        },
        "hosts": [
            "unused-alias-0"
        ]
    }
}

 

[Uditha Desilva]

Are you sure that's quite right? I'd have expected the "ansible_host" value within each host entry to be the same, otherwise you wouldn't have had the problem in the first place...?

[ryangr...@outlook.com]

Sorry, thanks for catching that error. I attached an amended version:

{
    "alias-1": {
        "vars": {
            "ansible_host": "example-0.com",

            "ansible_port": 5513
        },
        "hosts": [
            "unused-alias-1"
        ]
    },

    "alias-2": {
        "vars": {
            "ansible_host": "example-0.com",