How To Set Up Ansible Inventories

Introduction

Ansible is a modern configuration management tool that facilitates the task of setting up and maintaining remote servers, with a minimalist design intended to get users up and running quickly. Ansible uses an inventory file to keep track of which hosts are part of your infrastructure, and how to reach them for running commands and playbooks.

There are multiple ways in which you can set up your Ansible inventory file, depending on your environment and project needs. In this guide, we’ll demonstrate how to create inventory files and organize servers into groups and subgroups, how to set up host variables, and how to use patterns to control the execution of Ansible commands and playbooks per host and per group.