Inventory

An inventory is a list of hosts that are managed by Ansible. The inventory list supports classifying hosts into groups. In its simplest form, an inventory can be an INI file. The groups are represented as sections on the INI file. The classification can be based on the role of the hosts or any other system management need. It is possible to have a host appearing in multiple groups in an inventory file. The following example shows a simple inventory of hosts:

logserver1.example.com   

[controllers]  
ctl1.example.com  
ctl2.example.com   

[computes]  
compute1.example.com  
compute2.example.com  
compute3.example.com  
compute[20:30].example.com

The inventory file supports special patterns to represent large groups of hosts.

Ansible expects to find the inventory file at /etc/ansible/hosts, but a custom location can be passed directly to the Ansible command line.

Ansible also supports dynamic inventories that can be generated by executing scripts or retrieved from another management system, such as a cloud platform.