Option to allow empty inventory

Archives Ansible Developer
1

I’ve just submitted a pull request (#9748) to add an option to not error out when an inventory file does not define any host.
At the moment, this triggers an instant “ERROR: provided hosts list is empty” from ansible-playbook.

The use case for this is when hosts are first dynamically detected/provisionned on a local play and added to the inventory with add_host.

Currently, we can use the “comma hack”, but:

  1. it’s a hack and may disappear
  2. it does not allow the use of a group_vars directory at the same level as the inventory file (the comma makes is_file return false, so no basedir is set, and then no basedir is searched)
2

in current devel, empty inventories now give a warning not an error, so this should be possible now