In 2.0, when is the inventory read and the special "groups" variable populated?

Archives Ansible Project
1

Our playbooks set facts similar to

  • name: illustrate problem
    set_fact:
    monitoringServer: “{{ groups.nagios.0 }}”

In 1.9.x that would evaluate to the first server in the nagios group in inventory
In 2.0, groups doesn’t contain a value for nagios, or any other inventory group. It only contains “all” and “ungrouped”, both of which contain localhost.

2

That should only happen if you are using no inventory, the internal
fallback is to create a 'localhost' entry which defaults to those
groups.

3

Thanks for the tip. Some code that managed .ansible.cfg was misbehaving and changing the default inventory file unexpectedly.