Run Ansible playbook without inventory

I had a problem similar to this tonight. The core issue here is that PhoneGap doesn't have a web server built in. If you're developing locally, you probably are using a web server, so you can do something like: http://localhost/#/profile and the routing will work.

However, PhoneGap loads your code with a file:// URL, not http://. If you do $location.url("profile") you're replacing the entire URL with just file://profile, which doesn't exist. Same thing if you use a link like this: <a href="/#/profile">My Profile</a>

The solution is to somehow get your links to point to the right place. If you're using $location.url() you can prefix it with your file path: $location.url( window.location + "#/profile" )

If you're just making a link, you should be able to get away with taking off the leading slash to make it a relative URL: <a href="/#/profile">My Profile</a> becomes <a href="#/profile">My Profile</a>

Ansible's yaml plugin will actually parse a JSON file, and has done so for years.

It's barely documented but you can see in the parameters section of the yaml plugin docs, .json is listed as a valid extension.

The JSON format has the same semantics as the YAML format. Note: not the same format as the dynamic inventory!

So your JSON should look like,

{
   "instances": {
      "hosts": {
         "10.66.70.33": null
      }
   }
}

Note: it's "hosts" rather than "host" and each address is a dictionary/hash key with the values being host-specific vars.

Taking the first example from Working with Inventory docs,

all:
  hosts:
    mail.example.com:
  children:
    webservers:
      hosts:
        foo.example.com:
        bar.example.com:
    dbservers:
      hosts:
        one.example.com:
        two.example.com:
        three.example.com:

would look like,

{
  "all": {
    "hosts": {
      "mail.example.com": null
    },
    "children": {
      "webservers": {
        "hosts": {
          "foo.example.com": null,
          "bar.example.com": null
        }
      },
      "dbservers": {
        "hosts": {
          "one.example.com": null,
          "two.example.com": null,
          "three.example.com": null
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Those nulls are odd-looking but in the YAML example you'll see the trailing colon which does indeed mean each of those hosts are effectively dictionary/hash keys.

For the curious, the JSON-then-YAML loading code is in parsing/utils/yaml.py and the actual parsing is in parsing/inventory/yaml.py.