Inventories sourced from a project - no group_vars?

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1

Hi all,

I’d like to use the “Sourced from a Project” feature of the inventories but I’ve found that it doesn’t import any of my host_vars or group_vars with my project set up as it is:

project/ group_vars/ dev.yml host_vars/ hostname.yml inventories/ dev.ini

This was logged here but was regarding Tower rather than awx so was closed. Is there a certain way you have to layout the project to get this to work or is it just unsupported at the moment?

Using awx 1.0.2 commit ae06cff and awx_web/awx_task 1.0.2.337

Thanks,

Bobby

2

Hi Bobby,

In your case, it looks like group_vars and host_vars are adjacent to the project but not to the inventory file. If you want those variables imported, you would need to either:

  • move group_vars/host_vars inside the inventories directory and specify the dev.ini file as your inventory source

  • specify the inventories directory as your inventory source (though AWX doesn’t currently appear to detect a directory as a possible inventory source).

In their current location, group_vars/host_vars still work if you run ansible directory, because ansible itself loads group/host variables from the inventory as well as the project (see http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/playbooks_variables.html#variable-precedence-where-should-i-put-a-variable).

You can run either of the following to see which variables AWX should import for a given inventory source:

  • ansible-inventory -i inventories --list
  • ansible-inventory -i inventories/dev.ini --list
3

Hi Chris,

I moved both group_vars/ and host_vars/ into inventories/ and awx is now picking up the host_vars but still not the group_vars. Here’s how it’s currently set up (using one dev host as an example):

project/ inventories/ group_vars/ dev.yml host_vars/ hostname.yml dev.ini

dev.ini:

`
[loader]
hostname

[dev:children]
loader
`

I ran the ansible-inventory -i inventories/dev.ini --list command and it does display all group_vars and host_vars but AWX doesn’t pull them in.

4

Actually there’s something much weirder going on here. Will test and raise a bug on GitHub and post link here.

5

AWX relies on ansible-inventory to generate inventory. ansible-inventory, currently, applies group_vars to the respective hosts and only outputs host_vars. Example behavior https://github.com/chrismeyersfsu/ansible-examples/tree/master/ansible-inventory
If you run the make target in there with ansible 2.4.2.x you get the following:

ansible-inventory -i inventory --list
{
“_meta”: {
“hostvars”: {
“starscream”: {
“i_am_a_decepticon_group_variable”: “i_am_a_decepticon_group_variable_value”,
“i_am_a_starscream_host_variable”: “i_am_a_starscream_host_variable_value”,
“i_am_an_explicit_inventory_host_variable”: “i_am_an_explicit_inventory_host_variable_value”
}
}
},
“all”: {
“children”: [
“decepticons”,
“ungrouped”
]
},
“decepticons”: {
“hosts”: [
“starscream”
]
},
“ungrouped”: {}
}

where i_am_a_decepticon_group_variable is a groups variable, but, as you can see from the above, it is applied to the hostvars section. I’m checking with ansible core to see about changing ansible-inventory to allow for a flag to NOT apply group vars to host vars.