Hi!
I’m using ansible-inventory --list to get a parsed view of the inventory¹.
Unfortunately, it does too much: it also outputs a huge (8 MB compared to maybe a dozen KB for the inventory) key called _meta which I have to immediately throw away again because I’m not interested.
I looked into whether I could use the Python3 API directly, but the docs say it’s internal and paws away.
So, this would not be a problem (I can just throw away that subkey)… except, to output that part, it needs the vault password.
I didn’t even notice because I have a thing that decrypts the vault password using ssh-agent automatically when needed (blogpost (in English) on that coming), but others have not yet set that up and did notice, so I added --ask-vault-pass for now.
Could please an option like --no-vars or --no-meta be added to the ansible-inventory(1) tool so that it just… doesn’t do that?
Having looked at the source, that would be an addition of… maybe three lines or so (plus indenting change).
① This is for a verification tool that checks things like, every host has exactly one host playbook xor one group playbook; every host playbook handles exactly one host; every host is in the inventory; every group playbook handles exactly one group; warn if hosts in the inventory have neither host nor group playbook; check host and group names against an RE; generate a “master playbook” that imports all others; etc. — it’s probably very specific to one certain (possibly suboptimal but historically grown) repo layout, but if there is interest, I could probably share it, I’d have to ask but experience tells me chances are good.