How to get IP address from controller's /etc/hosts file?

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1

I’m trying to get the IP address of one of my remote hosts by querying my controller machine’s /etc/hosts file which happens to contain the IP addresses of all the servers I build with Ansible. My Ansible playbook looks like this:

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2

Note that my awk command should say “print $1” to get the IP address. I don’t see a way to edit my original question here to make this change.

3

Hi,

Not read everything but first thing is that if you have a pipe in a command call… you should use shell module instead… That should fix your first issue.

Regards,

JYL

4

Hi Robert,

Try using the shell module instead of the command module. The command module doesn’t execute a command in a shell, hence you cannot use shell functionality such as a pipes and redirections.

Hope that helps!

–Juerg

5

I neglected to mention that I did try the shell and it did not fix the problem. But thanks for the suggestion!

6

Hii

If you

  1. Properly format your playbook to be a list of plays
  2. Use shell
  3. Don’t use {{ }} around the var in your debug task

Then it works:

TASK [get file server’s IP address] ****************************************************************
changed: [villa → localhost]

TASK [debug] ***************************************************************************************
ok: [villa] =>
fs_ip_addr:
changed: true
cmd: grep prod-fs1 /etc/hosts | awk ‘{ print $0 }’
delta: ‘0:00:00.008973’
end: ‘2020-03-04 00:36:05.873228’
failed: false
rc: 0
start: ‘2020-03-04 00:36:05.864255’
stderr: ‘’
stderr_lines:
stdout: 10.10.10.20 prod-fs1
stdout_lines:

  • 10.10.10.20 prod-fs1

But I would also recommend:

  1. Dropping privilege escalation for local actions
  2. Use “print $1” as this will match the actual IP
  3. Use ‘stdout’ sa this will be the actual IP

Thus the playbook would be:

7

Dick,

Thank you very much! Your solution worked. I realized after I posted my question that I should have said “print $1” but I didn’t see a way to edit my question. I had also forgotten that when you do “debug: var=…” that you have to drop the double braces; they’re only used when you do “debug: msg=…”. Removing privilege escalation and using stdout were new to me. Thanks again.