Limiting the host’s execution

While testing a playbook, it might make sense to test on a restricted number of machines; for instance, just one. Let’s get started:

1. To use the limitation of target hosts on Ansible, we will need a playbook. Create a playbook called helloworld.yaml that contains the following content:

   ---
   - hosts: all
     tasks:
     - ansible.builtin.debug:
         msg: "Hello, World!"

2. We also need to create an inventory with at least two hosts. In my case, I created a file called inventory that contains the following content:

   [hosts]
   host1.example.com
   host2.example.com
   host3.example.com

Let’s run the playbook in the usual way with the following command:

$ ansible-playbook -i inventory helloworld.yaml

By doing this, we will receive the following output:

PLAY [all] ****************************************************************************************
TASK [Gathering Facts...