Use Ansible facts in an Ansible ad-hoc command

ansible ansible-facts ansible-ad-hoc
Mitch picture Mitch · Apr 7, 2016 · Viewed 7.9k times · Source

Is it possible to use what would normally be included in ansible_facts in an Ansible adhoc command?

For example, I have a file at /tmp/myFile on all of my servers and I'd like to do:

ansible all -i [inventory file] -m fetch -a "src=/tmp/myFile dest=myFile-[insert ansible_hostname here]"

Without having to make a whole playbook for it.

Answer

shaps picture shaps · Apr 8, 2016

No you cannot refer to ansible facts in ansible cli. This is because when you run ansible ... -m fetch you are not getting the facts of the host(s) you are running on. The facts are gathered with setup module ( you can try that by doing ansible ... -m setup. Anyway, this can be addressed with a simple playbook like

# file: fetchfile.yml
- hosts: all 
  tasks:
    - fetch: src=/tmp/myFile dest=myFile-{{ inventory_hostname }}

$ ansible-playbook -i [inventory_file] fetchfile.yml

ansible-playbook runs the setup module implicitly, so you will have access to all the facts as variables.

Related questions

Ansible: get current target host's IP address

How do you get the current host's IP address in a role? I know you can get the list of groups the host is a member of and the hostname of the host but I am unable to find a …

Read More
Where can I get a list of Ansible pre-defined variables?

I see that Ansible provide some pre-defined variables that we can use in playbooks and template files. For example, the host ip address is ansible_eth0.ipv4.address. Googleing and searching the docs I cound't find a list of all …

Read More
How to get an arbitrary remote user's home directory in Ansible?

I can do that with shell using combination of getent and awk like this: getent passwd $user | awk -F: '{ print $6 }' For the reference, in Puppet I can use a custom fact, like this: require 'etc' Etc.passwd { |user| …

Read More