# Gathering facts on a host not in the playbook

**URL:** <https://forum.ansible.com/t/gathering-facts-on-a-host-not-in-the-playbook/12322>\
**Category:** Ansible Project\
**Created:** [February 10, 2013, 1:55am UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/gathering-facts-on-a-host-not-in-the-playbook/12322 "2013-02-10T01:55:36Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![fdavis](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/a698b9/32.png) [@fdavis](https://forum.ansible.com/u/fdavis)\
**Post date:** [February 10, 2013, 1:55am UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/gathering-facts-on-a-host-not-in-the-playbook/12322/1 "2013-02-10T01:55:36Z")

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Hello again,

I came across a situation where I was having a playbook run just to gather facts for a template later on.

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**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:** [February 10, 2013, 2:53am UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/gathering-facts-on-a-host-not-in-the-playbook/12322/2 "2013-02-10T02:53:13Z")

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Is that actually a problem?

What you are doing should be totally fine and is the way I envisioned  
it should work.

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**Author:** ![fdavis](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/a698b9/32.png) [@fdavis](https://forum.ansible.com/u/fdavis)\
**Post date:** [February 10, 2013, 5:26am UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/gathering-facts-on-a-host-not-in-the-playbook/12322/3 "2013-02-10T05:26:35Z")

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Its not a problem at all.

Previously I was running templates based on data  
I’d already put into the inventory.

So it was a just a bit of a surprise when I ran the previous playbook without  
gathering facts.

Jinja2 gave me an odd error, something about  
unicode object has no member…

I can’t reproduce it on my laptop right now so I’ll have to  
look into that again later.