Inventory and Ad Hoc Commands

Part of the Ansible course

You now know Ansible connects to machines over SSH and describes desired state instead of steps. But before Ansible can talk to anything, it needs an address book: a list of the machines you want it to manage, and some way to group them so you can say "all the web servers" instead of naming each one by hand.

Once an inventory exists, you do not have to jump straight to a full playbook to get value out of Ansible. You can fire off a single command against every host in the inventory, or just one group of them, and see the result immediately. Those one-off commands are called ad hoc commands, and they are how most people spend their first hour with Ansible: poking at machines, checking things, running quick fixes, before...