ansible-variables

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.

Installation

pip install ansible-variables

Usage

The 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

Get all variables for a host

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.

Get one specific variables for a host

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.

More customization

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

Implementation

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.

Limitations

• 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.

Credits

• the screenshots used in this README where created with termshot

License

This project is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0