Creating Ansible Inventory from Vagrant SSH Configuration

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Vagrant-based labs running on top of VirtualBox use port mapping from host TCP ports in range 2000 – 2500 to SSH ports on managed virtual machines.

It’s relatively easy to create Ansible inventory that works in that environment: all you have to do is to specify ansible_host and ansible_port for every managed device, for example:

spine-1    ansible_host=127.0.0.1         ansible_port=2222
spine-2    ansible_host=127.0.0.1         ansible_port=2200
leaf-1     ansible_host=127.0.0.1         ansible_port=2201
leaf-2     ansible_host=127.0.0.1         ansible_port=2202

Extracting the information from the printout produced by vagrant ssh-config and copying the values into an Ansible inventory file is a perfect job for an automation script. You’ll find mine in the topologies directory of my Network Automation Workshop GitHub repository.

Using Vagrant2Inventory

The Vagrant2Inventory script executes vagrant ssh-config, parses the printout and prints Ansible inventory file generated from that information to STDOUT. These command line options are recognized by the script:

  • -a (or –address): specify IP address to use instead of 127.0.0.1. Use –a 10.0.2.2 if you want to access Vagrant VMs from within another VM in VirtualBox environment.
  • –vm: Ansible is running within a VM in VirtualBox. Use 10.0.2.2 instead of 127.0.0.1
  • -s (or –skip): skip hosts matching a regular expression. I use -s nms to remove my Ansible VM from the inventory file.
  • -u (or –username): use alternate username (default: vagrant)
  • -p (or –password): use alternate password (default: vagrant)

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