psansible.inventory

Ansible inventory helpers

Build Status

main functionality

psansible.inventory simplifies the management of static inventories by allowing the automation of every component that an inventory is composed of.

psansible.inventory allows to work with objects rather than with plain text / regexe's, and enable's complex scenarios around the automation of ansible inventories.

Currently, the following scenarios are supported:

• Inventory file import/manage/export
• Inventory structure import/manage/export
• Inventory entries (Read/edit/write)
• Inventory groups (Read/edit/write)
• Hierarchy definitions (Read/edit/write)
• group vars (Read/edit/write)
• host vars (Read/edit/write)

psansible.inventory enabled what dynamic inventories offers, but for static inventories (and does it in an easy, standard proefficient way).

installation

First and formost you will need to install powershell. See the following aricle to install it on linux. Once installed, call pwsh from any shell to start it.

Once installed, you can download the module as following. (internet connection needed)

install-module -Name psansible.inventory

If downloading from the internet is not option, you can download the module locally, and copy / paste it manually

import an existing inventory

Import-AnsibleInventory -Path '/user/etc/inventory.ini'

Create a new inventory (from scrach)

New-AnsibleInventory

#return

EntryCollection    : TotalEntries: 0
Hierarchy           : AnsibleInventoryHierarchyCollection
VariableCollection : AnsibleVariableCollection
GroupCollection    : 
Path               : 

Creating an ansible inventory entry

In the following example, we are creating a new inventory entry for a server called server123 which is member of the groups HR_Servers and PW_01.

New-AnsibleInventoryEntry -NodeName "server123" -Group "HR_Servers","PW_01"

#return

GroupMemberShip    NodeName
---------------    --------
{HR_Servers PW_01} server123

Creating new variables

The following example shows how to create a host variable

New-AnsibleInventoryVariable -Name "myvar" -value "123" -Type Host  -ContainerName "server123"

#Returns

Name  Value VarType ContainerName
----  ----- ------- -------------
myvar 123      Host server123

The following example shows how to create a group variable

New-AnsibleInventoryVariable -Name "mydata" -value "456" -Type Group  -ContainerName "HR_Servers"

#Returns

Name   Value VarType ContainerName
----   ----- ------- -------------
mydata 456     Group HR_Servers

Working with Hierarchy definitions

The following example shows how to create a simple Hierarchy. Both HR_Servers and MK_Servers are child groups of prod.

New-AnsibleInventoryHierarchyEntry -ParentName "prod" -Children "HR_Servers","MK_Servers"


Children                 Parent
--------                 ------
{HR_Servers, MK_Servers} prod

Exporting the inventory

The most simplest way of generating an inventory would be as followed.

Export Inventory to ini:

$Inventory = New-AnsibleInventory
Export-AnsibleInventory -Inventory $Inventory -OutputType INI -Path './Inventories/Windows/'

Export Inventory to json:

$Inventory = New-AnsibleInventory
Export-AnsibleInventory -Inventory $Inventory -OutputType json -Path './Inventories/Windows/'