Ansible: get a target host’s IP

By | 04/09/2019

The task is to get a host’s IP during executing an Ansible task.

Below – two examples of how this can be done.

Example 1 – hostvars

See the documentation here>>>.

Code:

- name: Test hosts list
  debug:
    msg: "{{ hostvars[inventory_hostname]['ansible_default_ipv4']['address'] }}"

Run it:

[simterm]

...
TASK [test : Test hosts list] ****
ok: [dev.backend-app1-internal.example.com] => {
    "msg": "10.0.2.71"
}
ok: [dev.backend-app2-internal.example.com] => {
    "msg": "10.0.2.91"
}
ok: [dev.backend-console-internal.example.com] => {
    "msg": "10.0.2.104"
}
ok: [dev.backend-bastion.example.com] => {
    "msg": "10.0.2.126"
}
...

[/simterm]

Example 2 – lookup and dig

Another approach could be using the lookup and its plugin dig.

See the documentation here>>>.

Code:

...
- name: Test hosts list
  debug:
    msg: "{{ lookup('dig', ansible_host) }}"
...

Run it:

[simterm]

...
TASK [test : Test hosts list] ****
ok: [dev.backend-app1-internal.example.com] => {
    "msg": "10.0.2.71"
}
ok: [dev.backend-app2-internal.example.com] => {
    "msg": "10.0.2.91"
}
ok: [dev.backend-bastion.example.com] => {
    "msg": "18.***.***.67"
}
ok: [dev.backend-console-internal.example.com] => {
    "msg": "10.0.2.104"
}
...

[/simterm]

Pay attention that in the first case the dev.backend-bastion.example.com domain was resolved to an EC2 Private IP while in the second example -to the Public IP.

The other domains has only Private IPs.