dynamic inventory from .ssh/config

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1

Hello,

at first, thanks for all the good work on Ansible, I like the project a lot! I spent more than a year working with Puppet, and I have to say that using Ansible is much less headache.

I tend to work with nodes of various nature. Some inventory info I can get from remote service (OpenStack Nova) and some I need to hardcode (“pet” nodes). I really like that the “hostfile” config option can take a directory as an agument, and evaluates everything below!

For the static part of my infrastructure, I use .ssh/config. I still didn’t get used to the Ansible “ini” static inventory. I wrote an inventory script which parses the .ssh/config and lets you use the Host alias with ansible. For example, if you have .ssh/config containing:

Host git
HostName git.domain.org
User tkarasek
IdentityFile /home/tomk/keys/thekey

You can do $ ansible git -m ping.

The script is at
https://github.com/t0mk/various/blob/master/ssh_config-inventory.py

Should I create pull request? Or is it against ansible philosophy?

Cheers,
Tomas

2

I’d be fine to include something like this in examples for those that want to use it.

Pull request would need a few things:

So the DOCUMENTATION string in here makes it look like it’s a module, but it’s really an inventory script, so I’d remove the “DOCUMENTATION” YAML block, since that was a bit confusing to me.

There are a few comments that don’t make sense, such as

" help_check_doc = ‘Check that DOCUMENTATION is valid yaml’"

3

Once you’ve got it tweaked, it can live here:

https://github.com/ansible/ansible/tree/devel/plugins/inventory

4

Cool. I cleaned it a bit and created:
https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/5995

Is there any guide on how to write unit tests for things like inventory plugins? Shall I just drop a unit test in tests/?