Ansible-pull with no inventory limitations

Question

I want to have a set of git repos with base application config playbooks in them such that all I need to do with any VM, regardless of its name or role or how long its been around, to get the base config installed is to run an ansible-pull command against this repo and I get a ready to use instance. The problem that I run into is that if I have a playbook local.yml that's set like so:

- hosts: localhost
  connection: local
  gather_facts: yes
  user: root
[...]

or like so:

- hosts: all
  connection: local
  gather_facts: yes
  user: root
 [...]

I keep getting the following error:

# ansible-pull -d /tmp/myrepo -U 'http://mygithost/myrepo' 
Starting ansible-pull at 2015-06-09 15:04:05
localhost | success >> {
    "after": "2e4d1c637170f95dfaa8d16ef56491b64a9f931b",
    "before": "d7520ea15baa8ec2c45742d0fd8e209c293c3487",
    "changed": true
}

**ERROR: Specified --limit does not match any hosts**

The only way I've been able to avoid the error is to create an explicit inventory file with an explicit groupname and explicit hostnames that is then referred to with the '-i' flag like so:

# cat /tmp/myrepo/myinventory
[mygroup]
myhost1
myhost2

# cat /tmp/myrepo/local.yml
- hosts: mygroup
  connection: local
  gather_facts: yes
  user: root
 [...]

# ansible-pull -d /tmp/myrepo -i myinventory -U 'http://mygithost/myrepo' 

But I don't want that, I want any host, no matter whether its name or role is known to be able to run an ansible-pull against the repo and run the playbook without having to explicitly configure the name of the host into the inventory. How do I do that?

Answer 1

Here is the workflow I use for ansible-pull within my VMs:

In the base VM I put a file named hosts at /etc/ansible:

# cat /etc/ansible/hosts
localhost ansible_connection=local

My local.yaml starts with

- hosts: localhost
  gather_facts: yes
  user: root
  ...

Now I can use ansible-pull without specifying a hosts file.