New minor feature.
I really wanted to be able to store structured group and host variables separate from my inventory.
Assume your inventory file is /etc/ansible/hosts and looks like this:
===== START =====
[webservers]
pinky
brain
[dbservers]
pinky
snowball
===== STOP =====
With this new feature, for the host Pinky, ansible will load variables from these places, in order:
/etc/ansible/group_vars/webservers
/etc/ansible/group_vars/dbservers
/etc/ansible/host_vars/pinky
If these files don't exist, nothing happens.
If your host file was in a different location, the path would still be relative to that file, so it still works for non-root/checkout users
(This is also, incidentally, how I'm going to enable removal of the YAML inventory format. We'll auto-convert any variables stored into an inventory
file into this structure.)
So yeah, with this, you can totally happily use the INI file format to describe your hosts and groups -- because it's a lot simpler -- and then if you
need for store a hash or a list or something in a group or host variable, you have a very easy way to do that.
Will include this in the docs section when 0.6 rolls out, but it's available on the development branch now.
--Michael