Ansible nested dictionary seems to do weird stuff with identical sub-groups

Archives Ansible Project
1

`

inventory.yml

europe:
children:
germany:
children:
on-premise:
hosts:
127.0.0.1:
datacenter:
hosts:
127.0.0.2:
france:
children:
on-premise:
hosts:
127.0.0.3:
datacenter:
hosts:
127.0.0.4:

`

Running the following command with different --limit options:

`
ansible-playbook -i inventory.yml random-playbook.yml --limit 'some-limit

`

  • europe I expect to run 127.0.0.1, 127.0.0.2, 127.0.0.3, 127.0.0.4
  • on-premise I expect to run 127.0.0.1, 127.0.0.3
  • datacenter I expect run 127.0.0.2, 127.0.0.4
  • germany I expect to run 127.0.0.1, 127.0.0.2
  • france I expect to run 127.0.0.3, 127.0.0.4

Now, my issue:

  • Europe works as expected
  • on-premise works as expected
  • datacenter works as expected
  • germany runs 127.0.0.1, 127.0.0.2, 127.0.0.3, 127.0.0.4
  • france runs 127.0.0.1, 127.0.0.2, 127.0.0.3, 127.0.0.4

After playing with it for a while, it seemed like this behaviour is gone once you don’t have 2 on-premise or 2 datacenter children in germany and france.

It feels like while creating the host list it is just like ‘alright, france, on-premise and datacenter are children … get all the children/hosts of that group’ … after which he finds hosts in datacenter group that never belonged to France in the first place.

I was just wondering if I’m doing this wrong, or whether this is intended behaviour

2

Those are not 'sub-groups' they are the same group. you are giving
them a parent/child relationship but all groups are 'global' so the
same name refers to the same group.
Only one 'on-premise' group exists, it is a chidl of france AND
germany, any hosts you assign to it at any point are always part of
that group.