A file (by default, Ansible uses a simple INI format) that describes Hosts and Groups in Ansible. Inventory can also be provided via an Inventory Script (sometimes called an “External Inventory Script [..]

An action is a part of a task that specifies which of the modules to run and which arguments to pass to that module. Each task can have only one action, but it may also have other parameters.

Refers to running Ansible to perform some quick command, using /usr/bin/ansible, rather than the orchestration language, which is /usr/bin/ansible-playbook. An example of an ad hoc command might be re [..]

Refers to a task that is configured to run in the background rather than waiting for completion. If you have a long process that would run longer than the SSH timeout, it would make sense to launch th [..]

A conditional is an expression that evaluates to true or false that decides whether a given task is executed on a given machine or not. Ansible’s conditionals are powered by the ‘when’ statement, whic [..]

A core software component of Ansible that is the power behind /usr/bin/ansible directly – and corresponds to the invocation of each task in a playbook. The Executor is something Ansible developers may [..]

Facts are simply things that are discovered about remote nodes. While they can be used in playbooks and templates just like variables, facts are things that are inferred, rather than set. Facts are au [..]

Ansible talks to remote nodes in parallel and the level of parallelism can be set either by passing --forks or editing the default in a configuration file. The default is a very conservative five (5) [..]

Globbing is a way to select lots of hosts based on wildcards, rather than the name of the host specifically, or the name of the group they are in. For instance, it is possible to select ww* to match a [..]

A group consists of several hosts assigned to a pool that can be conveniently targeted together, as well as given variables that they share in common.