Dynamic inventory and questions

[r3nor]

I am wondering how to build a dynamic inventory. I have a database of hosts, that gets updated, so my inventory must come from an API request.

Then, I need to be able to "limit" by hostname rather than IP, but the ssh connection must be done to an IP. What I have now is;

# inventory.py
import requests

response = requests.get('https://api.something.com/v1/servers', headers=headers)
data = response.json()

servers = []
for server in data["items"]:
    servers.append((server["ip"], {"hostname": server["hostname"]}))

I would like to limit by hostname, yet use ip to connect to that host. Is that possible to do? In ansible I can have the ansible_host variable.

[Fizzadar]

Hi @r3nor - this is indeed possible using the ssh_hostname data key, ie:

# inventory.py
import requests

response = requests.get('https://api.something.com/v1/servers', headers=headers)
data = response.json()

servers = []
for server in data["items"]:
    servers.append((server["hostname"], {"ssh_hostname": server["ip"]}))

All the available SSH options are listed here.