Creating custom dynamic inventories for Ansible
The following is an excerpt from Chapter 7 of Ansible for DevOps, a book on Ansible by Jeff Geerling.
Most infrastructure can be managed with a custom inventory file or an off-the-shelf cloud inventory script, but there are many situations where more control is needed. Ansible will accept any kind of executable file as an inventory file, so you can build your own dynamic inventory however you like, as long as you can pass it to Ansible as JSON.
You could create an executable binary, a script, or anything else that can be run and will output JSON to stdout, and Ansible will call it with the argument --list when you run, as an example, ansible all -i my-inventory-script -m ping.
Let's start working our own custom dynamic inventory script by outlining the basic JSON format Ansible expects: