Understand Core Components of Ansible

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Understand Core Components of Ansible - Inventories and Facts

The key to understanding Ansible lies with beginning to actually use Ansible. Grasping the basic concepts of inventories and facts is crucial to using Ansible, both in simple and more advanced implementations. This lab will make sure you have this basic understanding of where Ansible inventory files are, and how to set them up. *This course is not approved or sponsored by Red Hat.*

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Lab Info

Level

Beginner

Last updated

Sep 23, 2025

Duration

45m

Challenge

Fix the Ansible Inventory File
Running ansible all -m ping results in a failure complaining about YAML parsing the inventory file. So we need to look at the Ansible inventory.

Looking at /etc/ansible/hosts we can see that there's a comment line that isn't commented out, and that the only server listed is an example IP. Fixing the comment and changing the IP to 127.0.0.1, and then saving the file, will allow the command to work. It should end up looking similar to this:
```
127.0.0.1
```
Challenge

Generate a List of Facts About the Ansible Host
The easiest way to accomplish this task is with a one-liner:
```
ansible -m setup --tree /tmp/facts localhost
```
The ansible -m setup part grabs the facts, the --tree /tmp/facts specifies a directory for where to put the files containing these facts, and localhost is the server we're querying.

Now if we run ls /tmp/facts, we'll see 127.0.0.1 sitting there. This file contains all of the facts about the server at 127.0.0.1. If we'd run that command with all instead of localhost, then this directory would contain one file for each server in the inventory.

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