Inventories and host patterns

INI inventories only

This release reads static inventories in Ansible’s INI format. YAML inventories, inventory directories, dynamic inventory scripts and inventory plugins are not supported yet. Pass a single INI file with -i, or set inventory in ansible.cfg.

An INI inventory

inventory.ini

bastion ansible_host=198.51.100.7

[web]
web1 ansible_host=192.0.2.11
web2 ansible_host=192.0.2.12

[db]
db1 ansible_host=192.0.2.21 ansible_user=postgres

[prod:children]
web
db

[prod:vars]
ansible_user=deploy
ansible_ssh_common_args=-o ProxyJump=bastion

Volant reads hosts with inline variables, [group] sections, [group:children] and [group:vars], and comments starting with # or ;. Host ranges such as web[01:20] are not expanded.

localhost exists implicitly, with a local connection, when the inventory does not define it. Without -i and without an inventory setting, that implicit localhost is the only host.

Group and host variables

Volant reads group_vars/ and host_vars/ next to the inventory and next to the playbook, as files (group_vars/web.yml) or directories (group_vars/web/*.yml). Precedence shows where each layer sits.

A name that is both a host and a group means the host. Volant warns once per run when an inventory contains such a name, whatever pattern the run uses, because Ansible detects it when it loads the inventory.

Host patterns

A pattern in a play’s hosts: or in --limit follows Ansible’s grammar:

Pattern	Selects
all or *	every host
web:db or web,db	hosts in either group
web*, db?, host[abc], host[a-z]	shell-style wildcards on host and group names
web:&prod	hosts in web that are also in prod
web:!web2	hosts in web except web2
web[0], web[0:2], web[1:]	an index or a slice of the hosts a term produced

Slices include their end, as in Ansible: web[0:2] is three hosts. name[N-M] is accepted as an older spelling of name[N:M].

Terms are not applied in the order you write them. Plain terms come first, then & terms, then ! terms, which is what Ansible does. A pattern made only of ! or & terms starts from all.

A --limit that matches no host warns and narrows the run to what it did match.