Patterns

How to select hosts you wish to manage

See also

Examples

Examples of basic commands

Playbooks

Learning ansible’s configuration management language

Ansible works against multiple systems in your infrastructure at the same time. It does this by selecting portions of systems listed in Ansible’s inventory file, which defaults to /etc/ansible/hosts, and looks like this:

mail.example.com

[webservers]
foo.example.com
bar.example.com

[dbservers]
one.example.com
two.example.com
three.example.com

Targetting All Systems

The pattern ‘all’ or ‘*’ targets all systems in the inventory file.

Specific Hosts

It is possible to address specific hosts:

one.example.com one.example.com:two.example.com

Groups

The following patterns address one or more groups:

webservers webservers:dbservers

There is also a magic group ‘ungrouped’ which selects systems not in a group.

Wildcards

Individual hosts, but not groups, can also be referenced using wildcards:

*.example.com *.com

Mixing Things Up

Specific hosts, wildcards, and groups can all be mixed in the same pattern

one*.com:dbservers

It is not possible to target a host not in the inventory file.