I am trying to run an Ansible inventory file ansible -i hosts-prod all -u root -m ping
and it is failing with this message:
ERROR: The file hosts-prod is marked as executable,
but failed to execute correctly. If this is not supposed
to be an executable script, correct this with
`chmod -x hosts-prod`.
I believe this is because I am using Virtual Box and shared folders which is forcing all my files to ug+rwx. And vbox does not permit changing permissions on shared folders (at least shared folders coming from Windows which is my situation)
Is there a way to allow Ansible to run this file? I can see several options:
- Edit
hosts-prod
to become an executable file. I don't know what's involved in this (being new to Ansible, obviously).
- Set a configuration option in Ansible to tell it not to run this file as executable - just treat it as the static configuration file it is. I can't find an option to do this, so I suspect it's not possible.
- Move the file outside of shared-folders: not an option in my case.
- Your better idea..
All assistance/ideas appreciated!
The actual hosts-prod
config file looks as follows, so any tips on making it internally executable would be welcome:
web01 ansible_ssh_host=web01.example.com
db01 ansible_ssh_host=db01.example.com
[webservers]
web01
[dbservers]
db01
[all:vars]
ansible_ssh_user=root
Executable inventories are parsed as JSON instead of ini files, so you can convert it to a script that outputs JSON. On top of that, Ansible passes some arguments to them to a simple 'cat' isn't enough:
#!/bin/bash
cat <<EOF
{
"_meta": {
"hostvars": {
"host1": { "some_var": "value" }
}
},
"hostgroup1": [
"host1",
"host2"
]
...
}
EOF
Not as elegant as a simple 'cat', but should work.
@hkariti's answer is first and closest to the original question. I ended up re-writing the config file entirely into a Ruby script and that is working fine. I thought I'd share that code here since finding complete examples for Ansible dynamic inventory files wasn't super easy for me. The file is different from a static file in how you associate variables with machine listings in the inventory (using the _meta tag)..
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
# this file must be executable (chmod +x) in order for ansible to use it
require 'json'
module LT
module Ansible
def self.staging_inventory
{
local: {
hosts:["127.0.0.1"],
vars: {
ansible_connection: "local"
}
},
common: {
hosts: [],
children: ["web", "db"],
vars: {
ansible_connection: "ssh",
}
},
web: {
hosts: [],
children: ["web_staging"]
},
db: {
hosts: [],
children: ["db_staging"]
},
web_staging: {
hosts: ["webdb01-ci"],
vars: {
# server specific vars here
}
},
db_staging: {
hosts: ["webdb01-ci"]
}
}
end
end
end
# ansible will pass "--list" to this file when run from command line
# testing for --list should let us require this file in code libraries as well
if ARGV.find_index("--list") then
puts LT::Ansible::staging_inventory.to_json
end