<li><aclass="reference internal"href="#example-the-cobbler-external-inventory-script">Example: The Cobbler External Inventory Script</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
@ -243,6 +247,8 @@ of these options via an external interventory system.</p>
<p>If you have a data store system where an Ansible external inventory script doesn’t already exist, this may require a little coding,J
but we have a <aclass="reference external"href="https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/master/examples/scripts/cobbler_external_inventory.py">Cobbler example</a> in the main source tree – but it’s pretty simple, as we’ll explain below – that would provide a good starting point. Like with modules, it’s possible to build an external inventory script in any language, as long as it returns JSON.</p>
<p>If you are familiar with Puppet terminology, this concept is basically the same as ‘external nodes’, with the slight difference that it also defines which hosts are managed.</p>
<divclass="section"id="script-conventions">
<h3>Script Conventions<aclass="headerlink"href="#script-conventions"title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h3>
<p>When the external node script is called with no arguments, the script must return a JSON hash/dictionary of all the groups to be managed, with a list of each host/IP as the value for each hash/dictionary element, like so:</p>
<h3>Example: The Cobbler External Inventory Script<aclass="headerlink"href="#example-the-cobbler-external-inventory-script"title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h3>
<p>It is expected that many Ansible users will also be <aclass="reference external"href="http://cobbler.github.com">Cobbler</a> users. Cobbler has a generic
layer that allows it to represent data for multiple configuration management systems (even at the same time), and has
been referred to as a ‘lightweight CMDB’ by some admins. This particular script will communicate with Cobbler
@ -304,10 +313,15 @@ a conf.d file appropriately or something similar. Who knows.</p>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<htmlxmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><metahttp-equiv="Content-Type"content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/><title>ansible-playbook</title><linkrel="stylesheet"href="./docbook-xsl.css"type="text/css"/><metaname="generator"content="DocBook XSL Stylesheets V1.75.2"/></head><body><divxml:lang="en"class="refentry"title="ansible-playbook"lang="en"><aid="id398465"></a><divclass="titlepage"></div><divclass="refnamediv"><h2>Name</h2><p>ansible-playbook — run an ansible playbook</p></div><divclass="refsynopsisdiv"title="Synopsis"><aid="_synopsis"></a><h2>Synopsis</h2><p>ansible-playbook <filename.yml> … [options]</p></div><divclass="refsect1"title="DESCRIPTION"><aid="_description"></a><h2>DESCRIPTION</h2><p><spanclass="strong"><strong>Ansible playbooks</strong></span> are a configuration and multinode deployment system. Ansible-playbook is the tool
<htmlxmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><metahttp-equiv="Content-Type"content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/><title>ansible-playbook</title><linkrel="stylesheet"href="./docbook-xsl.css"type="text/css"/><metaname="generator"content="DocBook XSL Stylesheets V1.75.2"/></head><body><divxml:lang="en"class="refentry"title="ansible-playbook"lang="en"><aid="id503630"></a><divclass="titlepage"></div><divclass="refnamediv"><h2>Name</h2><p>ansible-playbook — run an ansible playbook</p></div><divclass="refsynopsisdiv"title="Synopsis"><aid="_synopsis"></a><h2>Synopsis</h2><p>ansible-playbook <filename.yml> … [options]</p></div><divclass="refsect1"title="DESCRIPTION"><aid="_description"></a><h2>DESCRIPTION</h2><p><spanclass="strong"><strong>Ansible playbooks</strong></span> are a configuration and multinode deployment system. Ansible-playbook is the tool
used to run them. See the project home page (link below) for more information.</p></div><divclass="refsect1"title="ARGUMENTS"><aid="_arguments"></a><h2>ARGUMENTS</h2><divclass="variablelist"><dl><dt><spanclass="term">
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<htmlxmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><metahttp-equiv="Content-Type"content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/><title>ansible</title><linkrel="stylesheet"href="./docbook-xsl.css"type="text/css"/><metaname="generator"content="DocBook XSL Stylesheets V1.75.2"/></head><body><divxml:lang="en"class="refentry"title="ansible"lang="en"><aid="id405326"></a><divclass="titlepage"></div><divclass="refnamediv"><h2>Name</h2><p>ansible — run a command somewhere else</p></div><divclass="refsynopsisdiv"title="Synopsis"><aid="_synopsis"></a><h2>Synopsis</h2><p>ansible <host-pattern> [-f forks] [-m module_name] [-a args]</p></div><divclass="refsect1"title="DESCRIPTION"><aid="_description"></a><h2>DESCRIPTION</h2><p><spanclass="strong"><strong>Ansible</strong></span> is an extra-simple tool/framework/API for doing 'remote things' over
<htmlxmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><metahttp-equiv="Content-Type"content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/><title>ansible</title><linkrel="stylesheet"href="./docbook-xsl.css"type="text/css"/><metaname="generator"content="DocBook XSL Stylesheets V1.75.2"/></head><body><divxml:lang="en"class="refentry"title="ansible"lang="en"><aid="id302414"></a><divclass="titlepage"></div><divclass="refnamediv"><h2>Name</h2><p>ansible — run a command somewhere else</p></div><divclass="refsynopsisdiv"title="Synopsis"><aid="_synopsis"></a><h2>Synopsis</h2><p>ansible <host-pattern> [-f forks] [-m module_name] [-a args]</p></div><divclass="refsect1"title="DESCRIPTION"><aid="_description"></a><h2>DESCRIPTION</h2><p><spanclass="strong"><strong>Ansible</strong></span> is an extra-simple tool/framework/API for doing 'remote things' over
@ -96,7 +96,7 @@ If you are familiar with Puppet terminology, this concept is basically the same
Script Conventions
++++++++++++++++++
``````````````````
When the external node script is called with no arguments, the script must return a JSON hash/dictionary of all the groups to be managed, with a list of each host/IP as the value for each hash/dictionary element, like so::
@ -117,7 +117,7 @@ if the script does not wish to do this, returning an empty hash/dictionary is th
}
Example: The Cobbler External Inventory Script
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
``````````````````````````````````````````````
It is expected that many Ansible users will also be `Cobbler <http://cobbler.github.com>`_ users. Cobbler has a generic
layer that allows it to represent data for multiple configuration management systems (even at the same time), and has
@ -174,4 +174,8 @@ So that's the Cobbler integration support -- using the cobbler script as an exam
:doc:`modules`
List of built-in modules
`Mailing List <http://groups.google.com/group/ansible-project>`_
Questions? Help? Ideas? Stop by the list on Google Groups
Michael DeHaan
12 years ago