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Ansible Playbook Essentials

You're reading from   Ansible Playbook Essentials Design automation blueprints to manage your multitier infrastructure

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Product type Paperback
Published in Aug 2015
Publisher
ISBN-13 9781784398293
Length 168 pages
Edition 1st Edition
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Author (1):
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Gourav Shah Gourav Shah
Author Profile Icon Gourav Shah
Gourav Shah
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Table of Contents (14) Chapters Close

Preface Setting Up the Learning Environment 1. Blueprinting Your Infrastructure FREE CHAPTER 2. Going Modular with Ansible Roles 3. Separating Code and Data – Variables, Facts, and Templates 4. Bringing In Your Code – Custom Commands and Scripts 5. Controlling Execution Flow – Conditionals 6. Iterative Control Structures – Loops 7. Node Discovery and Clustering 8. Encrypting Data with Vault 9. Managing Environments 10. Orchestrating Infrastructure with Ansible A. References
Index

Node discovery with magic variables

We have looked at user-defined variables as well as system data, that is, facts. In addition to these, there are a few variables that define the meta information about the nodes, inventory, and plays, for example, which groups a node belongs to, what groups are part of the inventory, which nodes belong to which group, and so on. These variables, which are implicitly set, are called magic variables, and are very useful for discovering nodes and topology information. The following table lists the most useful magic variables, and their description:

Magic Variable

Description

hostvars

These are lookup variables or facts set on another host.

groups

This is the list of groups in the inventory. This can be used to walk over a group of nodes to discover its topology information.

group_names

This is the list of groups that the node belongs to.

inventory_hostname

This is the hostname set in the inventory file. It can be different to the ansible_hostname...

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