Can't use ansible inventory file because it is

Question

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:

1. Edit hosts-prod to become an executable file. I don't know what's involved in this (being new to Ansible, obviously).
2. 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.
3. Move the file outside of shared-folders: not an option in my case.
4. 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

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

@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