Running a playbook against group of hosts in AWX

[GXW Online]

Hi,

I've been using ansible for quite a while and have lots of playbooks that I run from the command line.  I have an inventory with several groups in it.  When I run a playbook I can tell it to run against a single host, or an inventory group, or a host pattern, or any combination thereof.  So I might use this technique to run a playbook against a test server first, then the UAT group, and later the PROD group. 

Now I'm trying to move my work into AWX, and have imported my inventory and playbooks using a git source.  

I found a way to select an inventory group and then "Run Command" against that group which is OK for ad-hoc stuff, but there doesn't seem to be a way I can run playbooks against an inventory group.

Does anyone know if this is possible?

The closest I got is by using a survey in my template - and ask what hosts to run against,  and feed the answer through to a variable which I pass into the hosts: statement.

This does work but I have to manually code every possible answer for a multiple choice question, which means I'll have to modify all my surveys every time I add or change an inventory group.

The other option is a text answer to the survey but that means I have to validate every answer in my playbook somehow.

What I would like to do is have a survey that asks what group to run against, and automatically shows a list of groups in the active inventory - I know AWX can do this because it does it in the inventory hosts tab - but I would like to have this functionality in a survey.

Does anyone know if that can be done?

I also tried using "Limit" but that works on a host pattern and not all my groupings can be achieved with a host pattern - I just want to use the groups as already defined in the inventory.

[Wei-Yen Tan]

In the limit just use your group name?

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From: 'GXW Online' via AWX Project <awx-p...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, August 12, 2021 1:22:30 AM
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Subject: [awx-project] Running a playbook against group of hosts in AWX

 

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[GXW Online]

Thanks for the suggestion.  I tested that and whilst it does actually work, in that my playbook was restricted to running on the hosts in the group I specified in the Limit prompt, I'm not comfortable with that as a solution for a couple of reasons; 1) Limit is plain text so there is no validation of the input, and no restricting it to valid groups, 2) In order for Limit to work I need to set host: all in the playbook and I'm reluctant to do that because there is a risk that the playbook could be run accidentally against e.g. PROD.  Also, if I'm using Limit to select the group I might as well just use the Survey to set the group in plain text, but neither of these let me do what I really want to do which is select the group from a dropdown. 

[Wei-Yen Tan]

Ok try this. 

Create a var  in the hosts column. Say 'node' them do a survey to point to that.

In your playbook :

---

- name: example 

  hosts : "{{ nodes}}"

  Roles:

    - example_role 

Then in your survey create a drop down with your limited group /hostname then put the variable as node.

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From: 'GXW Online' via AWX Project <awx-p...@googlegroups.com>

Sent: Thursday, August 12, 2021 8:52:59 PM
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Subject: Re: [awx-project] Running a playbook against group of hosts in AWX

 

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[GXW Online]

Yes, thanks, that's what I was referring to in my original post when I said "The closest I got is ..." but does have some limitations.  Probably best I can do with AWX :-( 

[Wei-Yen Tan]

What you are really looking for is a form of logic in Choosing the limit. If that's the case then I think you are right. The best bet is to have another ui maybe like rundeck? Then pass your parameters to it. That system will have logic/through script  that will pass to ansible /awx. 

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Sent: Thursday, August 12, 2021 10:29:59 PM

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