Ansible - Use foreman as inventory source

When there's a foreman present in the environment, it's wise to use it as an inventory source for your ansible deployments since it will most likely always be up to date when it comes to hosts (single source of truth).

In order to use ansible as inventory, you'll have to define a *.foreman.yml file in your inventory which will then query the foreman for hosts, groups and variables which can then be used in ansible:

 [archy@ansible ~/ansible]$ vim inventories/foreman/archyslife.foreman.yml

 plugin: foreman
 url: https://katello.archyslife.lan
 user: roadmin
 password: !vault |
           $ANSIBLE_VAULT;1.1;AES256
           00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
           00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
           00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
           00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
           00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
           0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
 use_reports_api: false
 group_prefix: foreman_
 varrs_prefix: foreman_
 leading_separator: _
 legacy_hostvars: false
 validate_certs: false
 want_content_facet_attributes: true
 want_facts: true
 want_host_group: true
 want_hostcollections: false
 want_ipv4: true
 want_ipv6: false
 want_location: true
 want_organization: true
 want_params: true
 want_smart_proxies: true
 want_subnet: true
 want_subnet_v6: false

Note that I'm using an encrypted password here. To generate something like this you can use 'ansible-vault encrypt_string' like so:

 [archy@ansible ~/ansible]$ ansible-vault encrypt_string 'super_secure_password' --vault-password-file ~/.pswdfle

Now let's try querying the inventory for all groups to check if it works:

 [archy@ansible ~/ansible]$ ansible 'ansible.archyslife.lan' --inventory inventories/foreman --vault-password-file inventories/foreman/pswdfle --module-name debug --args 'var=groups'

This will print out all groups that were returned by foreman.

Keep in mind that the variable_prefixes as well as group_prefixes could be changed using the *.foreman.yml file.

Keep in mind that with AWX or Ansible Tower this can be done graphically using the WebUI.

Feel free to comment and / or suggest a topic.

Comments

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