The Inventory File, Patterns, and Groups

How to select hosts you wish to manage

See also

Command Line Examples

Examples of basic commands

Playbooks: Ansible for Deployment, Configuration Management, and Orchestration

Learning ansible’s configuration management language

Inventory File Format

Ansible works against multiple systems in your infrastructure at the same time. It does this by selecting portions of systems listed in Ansible’s inventory file, which defaults to /etc/ansible/hosts, and looks like this:

mail.example.com

[webservers]
foo.example.com
bar.example.com

[dbservers]
one.example.com
two.example.com
three.example.com

Selecting Targets

These patterns target all hosts in the inventory file:

all
*

It is also possible to address specific hosts:

one.example.com
one.example.com:two.example.com

The following patterns address one or more groups, which are denoted with the bracket headers in the inventory file:

webservers
webservers:dbservers

Individual hosts, but not groups, can also be referenced using wildcards:

*.example.com *.com

It’s also ok to mix wildcard patterns and groups at the same time:

one*.com:dbservers

NOTE: It is not possible to target a host not in the inventory file.