XO Ansible Dynamic Inventory Plugin - Group Variables Support?

guiand888

Hello!

I'm working with the community.general.xen_orchestra dynamic inventory plugin and trying to implement group-specific variables through the tagging function.

For instance, here's an example of a static inventory I currently have. Nothing fancy.

gp1:
  vars:
    ansible_user: admin
  hosts:
    server1.example.com:
    server2.example.com:
gp2:
  vars:
    ansible_user: anotheradmin
  hosts:
    server3.example.com:
    server4.example.com:

The following dynamic inventory configuration works fine:

plugin: community.general.xen_orchestra
api_host: xo.example.com
user: admin
password: mypass
validate_certs: true
use_ssl: true
groups:
    gp1: "'gp1' in tags"
    gp2: "'gp2' in tags"

But adding group vars breaks it:

[...]
groups:
    gp1: "'gp1' in tags"
        vars:
            ansible_user: admin
    gp2: "'gp2' in tags"
        vars:
            ansible_user: anotheradmin

I'm wondering if the plugin supports adding group-specific variables directly in the dynamic inventory configuration.

Would appreciate hearing if anyone has made this work and the most elegant and supported solution. I looked extensively through the forum, blog posts, etc. and could not figure it out.

Thanks in advance for your help!

olivierlambert

Adding @shinuza and @nathanael-h in the loop

nathanael-h

Hello @guiand888

You could use compose in your inventory file like this:

plugin: community.general.xen_orchestra
api_host: xo.example.com
user: admin
password: mypass
validate_certs: true
use_ssl: true
groups:
    gp1: "'gp1' in tags"
    gp2: "'gp2' in tags"
compose:
  ansible_user: "'admin' if 'gp1' in tags else 'anotheradmin' if 'gp2' in tags"

I made some local tests, this should do what you need. Maybe @shinuza has a better suggestion for writing the Jinja2 expression in the compose key.

shinuza

@guiand888 Hey, the plugin does support composite vars. However I believe the idiomatic way to do what you want is this:

group_vars/
  gp1.yml
  gp2.yml

And then:

# gp1.yml
ansible_user: admin

# gp2.yml
ansible_user: anotheradmin

guiand888

Many thanks @nathanael-h & @shinuza , both approaches indeed work!