dignajar / ansible-discovery

Ansible discovery host and filter by operating system

Ansible Discovery

Ansible hosts discovery and filter by operating system.

How this works ?

The Ansible server has a web server and each client has a curl who make a request to the web server every day. The server generate a JSON file for each request from clients and update the timestamp.

JSON file for the hostname client01

{
    "hostname":"client01",
    "os":"centos",
    "time":"2016-05-18 14:30:00"
}

JSON file for the hostname client02

{
    "hostname":"client02",
    "os":"ubuntu",
    "time":"2016-05-18 15:30:00"
}

After the clients make the HTTP request, you can execute the generate-host.py file on the server and this script generate the host list for Ansible.

Ansible host list /etc/ansible/hosts

[centos]
client01

[ubuntu]
client02

Ansible Client

For each client should create a cron task with the command curl to annunce to the Ansible web server.

For example, if your client is an Ubuntu Linux, you can create the next cron task.

* 19 * * * curl --silent http://ansible-server -X POST -d "hostname=`hostname`" -d "os=Ubuntu"

This cron execute every day at 19:00hs, this make an HTTP request method POST, with the hostname and os, as variables.

Ansible Server

Web server

• Web server root path: /www/
• Web server root index: /www/index.php
• Web server JSON file list: /www/hosts/

Cron to generate the /etc/ansible/hosts file

The script generate-host.py generate the file /etc/ansible/hosts for Ansible, the list of hosts are obtained from /www/hosts/, you can create a cron task to execute this script every day.

For example, the task for generate the file of host list is executed at 20:00hs, after the clients are announced.

* 20 * * * /usr/bin/python /root/generate-host.py