How to select hosts you wish to manage
See also
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
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.