Iterating Ansible setup command - linux

Question

I want to use ansible setup module to retrieve hosts specs and I tried with a bash for loop.
Ansible version: 2.4
My hosts inventory has been defined in a group of machines which I called rhelmachines
I would like to collect the following list of variables called "specs"
declare -a specs=("ansible_all_ipv4_addresses" "ansible_processor" "ansible_processor_cores" "ansible_uptime_seconds")
I am then trying to include the ansible command in a for bash loop:
for i in "${specs[#]}"
do
ansible rhelmachines -m setup -a 'filter='$i'
done
how can I concatenate multiple filters in one connection only ?
Thanks!

Answer 1

With a little sed hackery to convert ansible's output to JSON, you can use jq to extract only the pieces you need:
ansible -m setup localhost | sed -e 's/^[[:alpha:]].*[|].* [>][>] {$/{/' | jq -n '
[inputs |
.ansible_facts as $facts |
$facts.ansible_hostname as $hostname |
{($hostname): {
"ipv4_addresses": $facts.ansible_all_ipv4_addresses,
"processor": $facts.ansible_processor[0],
"cores": $facts.ansible_processor_cores,
"uptime": $facts.ansible_uptime_seconds}}] | add'
...generates output of the form:
{
"my-current-hostname": {
"ipv4_addresses": [
"192.168.119.129"
],
"processor": "Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6700HQ CPU # 2.60GHz",
"cores": 1,
"uptime": null
}
}
(run with ansible 1.4.5, which doesn't generate uptime).

Answer 2

As one of the possible solution, I implemented an Ansible code exploiting Ansible facts. I implemented it first gathering the ansible facts. Then, I used a local_action and a loop. The loop indices are the several ansible facts. For every fact I am writing out a line of a file. In this way I am getting a file composed by all the ansible facts I declared in the loop for the rhelmachines.
---
- hosts: rhelmachines
gather_facts: True
tasks:
- name: Gather Facts
setup:
gather_subset=all
register: facts
- debug:
msg: "{{ facts.ansible_facts.ansible_all_ipv4_addresses }}"
- name: copy content from facts to output file
local_action:
module: lineinfile
line: "{{ item }}"
path: /tmp/assessments/facts.txt
loop:
- "{{ facts.ansible_facts.ansible_all_ipv4_addresses }}"
- "{{ facts.ansible_facts.ansible_all_ipv6_addresses }}"

Answer 3

I took #Luigi Sambolino answer and make it better. His answer was failing on more than one host in the inventory. He proposed using lineinfile which has one con in this situation - every fact that was the same as other machines were omitted. Other drawback was that results wasn't sorted together, all was mixed.
I needed to take some basic information about systems, like IP, OS version, and so on. Here's my playbook:
- hosts: all
gather_facts: true
ignore_unreachable: true
tasks:
- name: get the facts
setup:
gather_subset=all
register: facts
- name: remove file
local_action:
module: file
path: results
state: absent
- name: save results in file
local_action:
module: shell
cmd: echo "{{ item }}" >> results
with_together:
- "{{ facts.ansible_facts.ansible_default_ipv4.address }}"
- "{{ facts.ansible_facts.ansible_architecture }}"
- "{{ facts.ansible_facts.ansible_distribution }}"
- "{{ facts.ansible_facts.ansible_distribution_version }}"
- "{{ facts.ansible_facts.ansible_hostname }}"
- "{{ facts.ansible_facts.ansible_kernel }}"
Now the results look like this:
...
['10.200.1.21', 'x86_64', 'Ubuntu', '18.04', 'bacula', '4.15.18-7-pve']
['10.200.2.53', 'x86_64', 'Ubuntu', '18.04', 'webserver', '4.15.18-27-pve']
...
Square brackets can be deleted by sed and we have a nice CSV file that can be used with any spreadsheet, for example.

Answer 4

specs=( "ansible_all_ipv4_addresses"
"ansible_processor"
"ansible_processor_cores"
"ansible_uptime_seconds" )
args=( )
for spec in "${specs[#]}"; do args+=( -a "$spec" ); done
ansible rhelmachines -m setup "${args[#]}"
...will result in your final command being equivalent to:
ansible rhelmachines -m setup \
-a ansible_all_ipv4_addresses \
-a ansible_processor \
-a ansible_processor_cores \
-a ansible_uptime_seconds