The Ansible inventory provides a very powerful framework to declare variables in a hierarchical manner. There a lof of different places where a variable can be defined (inventory, host_vars, groups_vars, ...) and Ansible will merge them in a specific order (variable precedence).
ansible-variables will help to keep track of your host context variables:
- inventory file or script group vars
- inventory group_vars/all
- inventory group_vars/*
- inventory file or script host vars
- inventory host_vars/*
Based on one host it will return a list with all variables, values and variable type.
Tested with ansible-core 2.11 - 2.18.
pip install ansible-variablesThe command line usage is similar to the official Ansible CLI tools, especially like ansible-inventory, thus to see all possible commands and options run
ansible-variables --help
The basic usage is pretty simple, you only need to pass the Ansible hostname to it:
ansible-variables mywebserver
This results in following simple rich formatted output
The verbosity can be increased Ansible like with -v, -vvv, ...
With -v the inventory files where the variable is defined, will be printed. The last file wins.
With -vvv it will also print all files which were considered to look for the variable.
If you are only interested in one variable you can specify it with --var:
ansible-variables mywebserver --var foo
Same es above, the verbosity can also increase here.
With --help you will see which further arguments are possible, e.g. you can set the path to your inventory with -i
ansible-variables mywebserver -i /path/to/inventory
This tool is tightly coupled to the Ansible library (ansible-core) and simple reuses what is already there.
The whole structure and implementation was inspired and oriented by the implementation of
ansible-inventory.
To get the source and the inventory files in which Ansible will look for a variable,
we are using a debug flag
in Ansible's get_vars method.
As as result, the output of ansible-variables can be fully trusted
as it uses the same methods as Ansible to get the variable precedence.
- as written in the description, this tool only shows host context variables and does not know anything about playbook or role variables or command line options.
- the screenshots used in this README where created with termshot
This project is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0