Choosing Your Targets

Abstract

In the previous chapter, we created what we called a very simple inventory file, so you could be forgiven for thinking it isn’t all that important. Nothing could be further from the truth. The inventory file is pivotal to your Ansible journey, and mastering it is the key to effectively managing large, complex configurations of servers. In this chapter we will expand our knowledge of the all-important Inventory, using groups of hosts, assigning variables that can differ per host or group and targeting these groups using include/exclude options to the ansible command.