Ansible: no hosts matched

ansibleansible-playbook

I'm trying to execute my first remote shell script on Ansible. I've first generated and copied the SSH keys. Here is my yml file:

---
- name: Ansible remote shell
  hosts: 192.168.10.1
  user: myuser1
  become: true
  become_user: jboss
  tasks:
    - name: Hello server
      shell: /home/jboss/script.sh

When launching the playbook however, the outcome is "no hosts matched":

ansible-playbook setup.yml 

PLAY [Ansible remote shell
******************************************** 
skipping: no hosts matched

PLAY RECAP ********************************************************************

I've tried also using the host name (instead of the IP address), however nothing changed. Any help ?

Best Answer

You need to define a host inventory.

The default path for this is /etc/ansible/hosts (as also stated by helloV).

For a minimal example you can also specify an inventory in the command line:

ansible-playbook setup.yml -i 192.168.10.1,

The trailing comma makes it a list, such that ansible parses it directy. Otherwise you can run

ansible-playbook setup.yml -i myinventory

where myinventory is a file listing your hosts.

Related Solutions

Finding file name in files section of current Ansible role

It looks like you need access to a task that looks up information locally, and then uses that information as input to the copy module.

There are two ways to get local information.

use local_action:. That's shorthand for running the task agains 127.0.0.1, more info found here. (this is what you've been using)
use a lookup. This is a plugin system specifically designed for getting information locally. More info here.

In your case, I would go for the second method, using lookup. You could set it up like this example:

vars:
  local_file_name: "{{ lookup('pipe', 'ls -1 files/*.txt') }}"

tasks:
  - name: copy file
    copy: src="{{ local_file_name }}" dest=/path/to/fixedname.txt

Or, more directly:

tasks:
  - name: copy file
    copy: src="{{ lookup('pipe', 'ls -1 files/*.txt') }}" dest=/path/to/fixedname.txt

With regards to paths

the lookup plugin is run from the context of the task (playbook vs role). This means that it will behave differently depending on where it's used.

In the setup above, the tasks are run directly from a playbook, so the working dir will be:

/path/to/project -- this is the folder where your playbook is.

If you where to add the task to a role, the working dir would be:

/path/to/project/roles/role_name/tasks

In addition, the file and pipe plugins run from within the role/files folder if it exists:

/path/to/project/roles/role_name/files -- this means your command is ls -1 *.txt

caveat:

The plugin is called every time you access the variable. This means you cannot trust debugging the variable in your playbook, and then relying on the variable to have the same value when used later in a role!

I do wonder though, about the use-case for a file that resides inside a projects ansible folders, but who's name is not known in advance. Where does such a file come from? Isn't it possible to add a layer in between the generation of the file and using it in Ansible... or having a fixed local path as a variable? Just curious ;)

Linux – Ansible cannot make dir /$HOME/.ansible/cp

Try sudo chown -R YOUR_USERNAME /home/YOUR_USERNAME/.ansible