Ansible dynamic inventory when connecting with AWS

Question

I have downloaded ec2.py and ec2.ini files and placed them under

/etc/ansible/inventory

and i have changed the ansible.cfg to

inventory      = /etc/ansible/inventory/ec2.py

i have environment variables set up as

export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID="XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY="XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"
export AWS_DEFAULT_REGION="us-east-1"
export EC2_INI_PATH="/etc/ansible/inventory/ec2.ini"

now when i run ansible -m ping all i am getting

[WARNING]: provided hosts list is empty, only localhost is available

instead of pinging all instances in my account

when i run ./ec2.py --list i get

{
   "_meta": {
   "hostvars": {}
}
}

all my instances in aws are running

Answer 1

It seems you are not using the right inventory file.

• Check ec2.py is executable (chmod +x)

• Run ansible with -v option to check what config file it is really using

  ansible -v -m ping all

• Check if you have ANSIBLE_INVENTORY or ANSIBLE_HOSTS environment variables overriding expected config file. You can override inventory definition by setting

  export ANSIBLE_INVENTORY=/etc/ansible/inventory/ec2.py

Remind that configuration files are processed in the following order

• ANSIBLE_CONFIG (an environment variable)
• ansible.cfg (in the current directory)
• .ansible.cfg (in the home directory)
• /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg

Prior to 1.5 the order was:

• ansible.cfg (in the current directory)
• ANSIBLE_CONFIG (an environment variable)
• .ansible.cfg (in the home directory)
• /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg