Inventory file parameters not being used in Ansible

Question

I’m trying to get Ansible up and running for the first time. For some reason, the parameters I have added to my hosts file are not being used when I run a command like ansible all -m ping

It tries to ping the two hosts in the file but uses my local username rather than the one specified in the hosts file.

I have the following hosts file:

[dev]

xx.5.xxx.1xx ansible_user=ec2-user ansible_ssh_private_key_file=~/Documents/AWSKeys/myKey1.pem  
mysite.theweb.com ansible_user=ec2-user ansible_ssh_private_key_file=~/Documents/AWSKeys/myKey2.pem 

However, if I pass in the parameters in the command itself, it works just fine.

This is successful:

ansible all -m ping -u ec2-user

The keys are loaded into the SSH agent.

I want to use the hosts file to add a lot of machines with different keys so I really need to get this working.

Answer 1

I figured it out. Running ansible --version returned a version prior to the 2.0 release. The current documentation is written for >2.0.

I was able to use ansible_ssh_user=ec2-user which is depreciated in v2.0.