# developers: Preview of aforementioned inventory refactoring

**URL:** <https://forum.ansible.com/t/developers-preview-of-aforementioned-inventory-refactoring/11510>\
**Category:** Ansible Project\
**Created:** [May 6, 2012, 5:58pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/developers-preview-of-aforementioned-inventory-refactoring/11510 "2012-05-06T17:58:59Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Michael\_DeHaan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/c4cdca/32.png) [@Michael\_DeHaan](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Michael_DeHaan)\
**Post date:** [May 6, 2012, 5:58pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/developers-preview-of-aforementioned-inventory-refactoring/11510/1 "2012-05-06T17:58:59Z")

</div>

Things are looking pretty nice.

I'm going to reimplement support for the executable inventory file  
next and likely the YAML format soon after.

This is important because this means it will be much easier to work on  
how hosts/variables/groups are used throughout the app -- and this is  
also needed for the what I've talked about -- not using SSH config any  
more and keeping that in inventory. More impotantly, it seperates  
format and raw datastructures from conceptual matters. (This kind of  
cleanup may happen to playbooks some day soon as well, but I think is  
less urgent). Once this is all done and we have a more capable INI  
file,  
I can update the docs on inventory/variables in general and there will  
be better examples.

Thankfully we have some very nice tests from Jeroen from last time, so  
we'll be assured everything continues to work as expected.

Here's a preview from my branch, totally unsupported of course:

[https://github.com/mpdehaan/ansible/tree/devel/lib/ansible](https://github.com/mpdehaan/ansible/tree/devel/lib/ansible)

See inventory.py, group.py, host.py, inventory\_parser.py, etc.

(Also, it's not quite all well commented yet)

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Michael\_DeHaan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/c4cdca/32.png) [@Michael\_DeHaan](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Michael_DeHaan)\
**Post date:** [May 6, 2012, 7:01pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/developers-preview-of-aforementioned-inventory-refactoring/11510/2 "2012-05-06T19:01:32Z")

</div>

Ok, I lied. It's on devel now.

Wasn't much the plan, but we'll ride with it, INI works + external API  
scripts, and YAML support is coming soon (tonight?)

Rather than pull the code, since the tests pass, report any issues you  
find with it (sans YAML), and I'll have YAML in probably this evening.

--Michael