Third-party commands

Before we finish looking at the various Ansible commands, let’s look at a command that isn’t shipped as part of Ansible itself but is, in fact, a third-party open source project.

The ansible-inventory-grapher command

The ansible-inventory-grapher command, by Will Thames, uses the Graphviz library to visualize your host inventories. The first thing we need to do is install Graphviz. To install this on macOS using Homebrew, run the following command:

$ brew install graphviz

To install Graphviz on Ubuntu, use the following command:

$ sudo apt-get install graphviz

Once installed, you can install ansible-inventory-grapher using pip:

$ pip install ansible-inventory-grapher

Now that we have everything installed, we can generate the graph using the hosts file we used earlier in this chapter:

$ ansible-inventory-grapher -i hosts demohosts

This will generate something that looks like this:

Figure 3.23 –...