ansible/rst/patterns.rst
Michael DeHaan d3fe5f617a Rename 'yamlscripts' to 'yamlsyntax', add some extra crosslinking to make sure folks find the
interesting docs pages, some misc editing here and there.
2012-03-11 15:34:21 -04:00

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.. _patterns:
The Inventory File, Patterns, and Groups
========================================
How to select hosts you wish to manage
.. seealso::
:doc:`examples`
Examples of basic commands
:doc:`playbooks`
Learning ansible's configuration management language
.. _inventoryformat:
Inventory File Format
+++++++++++++++++++++
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
The things in brackets are group names, you don't have to have them,
but they are useful.
Selecting Targets
+++++++++++++++++
These patterns target all hosts in the inventory file::
all
*
Basically 'all' is an alias for '*'. It is also possible to address a specific host or hosts::
one.example.com
one.example.com:two.example.com
192.168.1.50
192.168.1.*
The following patterns address one or more groups, which are denoted
with the aforementioned bracket headers in the inventory file::
webservers
webservers:dbservers
Individual host names (or IPs), but not groups, can also be referenced using
wildcards::
*.example.com
*.com
It's also ok to mix wildcard patterns and groups at the same time::
one*.com:dbservers
.. note::
It is not possible to target a host not in the inventory file. This is a safety feature.
Easy enough. Now see :doc:`examples` and then :doc:`playbooks` for how to do things to selected hosts.