Ansible supports a few ways of providing configuration variables, mainly through environment variables, command line switches and an ini file `ansible.cfg`.
Starting at Ansible 2.4 the `ansible-config` utility allows users to see all the configuration settings available, their defaults, how to set them and
where their current value comes from. See :doc:ansible-config for more information.
The configuration file
======================
Changes can be made and used in a configuration file which will be searched for in the following order::
* ANSIBLE_CONFIG (environment variable if set)
* ansible.cfg (in the current directory)
* ~/.ansible.cfg (in the home directory)
* /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg
Ansible will process the above list and use the first file found, all others are ignored.
.. note:: Comments
The configuration file is one variant of an INI format.
Both the hash sign ("#") and semicolon (";") are allowed as
comment markers when the comment starts the line.
However, if the comment is inline with regular values,
only the semicolon is allowed to introduce the comment.
For instance::
# some basic default values...
inventory = /etc/ansible/hosts ; This points to the file that lists your hosts