issue in counting no. of host in inventory ?

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1

I wrote a playbook to count number of host in inventory, can someone look or suggest better way of achieving this task, this play gives error in compling stage itself, however when I check the syntax in http://codebeautify.org/yaml-validator this shows it is valid.

Please add your comment and suggestions ?

My Playbook

2

you have no action in that task, guessing you want:

- name: Host Count
   debug:
       msg: "{{ groups['ios_switches'] | length }}"

3

It tasks and not task.

4

Thank You Kai,

I corrected that and made some more changes to my playbook which eventually worked. We can also use

debug:
msg: “Host count: {{ ansible_play_hosts | length }}”

  • ansible_play_hosts is an Ansible-defined variable which is a list of the hosts in the current play, i.e. what the above pattern matches

  • run_once ensures we don’t run the debug command for every single host in the list, which would be a big waste of time

5

or just run on localhost

- name: Host Count In Inventory
  hosts: localhost
  gather_facts: no
  tasks:

    - name: Host Count
      debug:
         msg: "Host Count: {{ groups['ios'] | length }}"

alternatively:

ansible ios --list-hosts|head -n 1