[ansible 2.0] from dynamic inventory, groups showing as hosts

[senorsmile]

ISSUE TYPE

• Bug Report

COMPONENT NAME

• dynamic inventory

ANSIBLE VERSION

• v2.0.0-0.8.rc3
• v2.0.0.0-1
• v2.0.0.1-1
• v2.0.0.2-1

We are noticing some errors while testing on ansible v2.0 (now rc3), where "sub-groups" are being mentioned as failing nodes.

I have narrowed this down to a reproducible case. Note that it does NOT happen with "subgroups" in a plain hosts file. Only when coming from a dynamic inventory script.

Say you have the following output from your dynamic inventory:

{
'group1': {
  'children': [
    'group1_1',
    'group1_2'
  ]
},
'group1_1': [
  'host1',
  'host2'
]
}

now, try to run e.g.

ansible group1 --list-hosts

Under ansible 1.9.4 you will only get the hosts.
In 2.0 you get the hosts PLUS group1_1.

I have narrowed this down a bit.

It did NOT happen at this commit:

commit e36b7130ff1c5366ab1c767641a8819d4fdf5e5f
Merge: 9a90ca5 d2ba0de
Author: Brian Coca <bcoca@ansible.com>
Date:   Mon Jun 1 11:01:59 2015 -0400

A couple of unworking merges later, it starts happening:

commit 860a96cf7068e907c8e645e2325e5e4e58bb20f3
Merge: bc041ff caf3cf6
Author: Brian Coca <bcoca@ansible.com>
Date:   Tue Jun 2 10:25:45 2015 -0400

I have not yet been able to track down the issue in code. This has been reproduced on multiple machines and Mac OS and Ubuntu 14.04.

[nflx]

This commit removed 'children' from this line
ce3ef7f#diff-a4d695beaa410b22bfeb22749cdaa210R99
When I add that again it works for me.

Also this issue has been resolved before?
69740b8

A possible workaround to the dynamic inventory script could be to add a 'vars' key with empty dict as value {} but I don't know any other implications of this... so yeah.

{
'group1': {
  'children': [
    'group1_1',
    'group1_2'
  ]
  ,
  'vars' : {}
},
'group1_1': [
  'host1',
  'host2'
]
}

[senorsmile]

@nflx Your fix in the ansible-inventory module you're using is perfect. The dynamic inventory that I'm using is internal and highly customized for our environment, but this workaround should be easy to implement. Plus, that implementation gives me great ideas to add to our dynamic inventory. Thanks!

[camerondavison]

did this bug get missed. it looks like it was marked for the stable milestone, and 2.0 is released https://www.ansible.com/blog/ansible-2.0-launch and this still exists. I have a pretty simple script generating something like.

{
  "ephemeral-172_31_41_195": {
    "hosts": [
      "172.31.41.195"
    ]
  },
  "ephemeral": {
    "children": [
      "ephemeral-172_31_41_195",
      "ephemeral-172_31_35_68"
    ]
  },
  "ephemeral-172_31_35_68": {
    "hosts": [
      "172.31.35.68"
    ]
  }
}

which broke, but when I added the "vars": {} line fixed it

{
  "ephemeral-172_31_41_195": {
    "hosts": [
      "172.31.41.195"
    ]
  },
  "ephemeral": {
    "vars": {},
    "children": [
      "ephemeral-172_31_41_195",
      "ephemeral-172_31_35_68"
    ]
  },
  "ephemeral-172_31_35_68": {
    "hosts": [
      "172.31.35.68"
    ]
  }
}

Im pretty glad I came across this issue because I had no idea why things all of a sudden just broke so badly. all of the configs that were attached to the host "ephemeral" all of a sudden did not work, since it was actually trying to resolve that as a host name.

[ansibot]

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[senorsmile]

I updated the original request and retested from git several different versions of 2.0.x.

It appears that as of 2.0.1 this bug is no longer present.

I have tested it is NOT present on:

• v2.0.1.0-1
• v2.0.2.0-1
• v2.1.5.0-1
• v2.2.2.0-1
• v2.3.0.0-0.6.rc6

Since it seems to have been incidentally fixed in 2.0.1, marking this as closed.