switch to use ansible-playbook + generated inventory

[jonmorehouse]

After some digging into the the source of ansible a bit more, it seems like a few features are going to be trickier to implement than originally anticipated, most notably the following:

• vault password encryption / decryption
• become password
• tags

I think a better approach would be to focus on generating an inventory file, similar to how vagrant and packer do, uploading said inventory file and then running ansible-playbook on the host itself. It seems like this would allow us to have better feature parity with ansible and would vastly simplify the setup!

Here's how I could see all this working out...

1. specify config args which match the arguments that can be passed into ansible-playbook in the terraform module itself
2. add the ability to customize, via terraform variables the following: hostgroups, groups, vars, roles, tags etc. Basically, let's attempt to match feature parity of what an inventory file can hold
3. Generate, from our configuration, a json inventory file and then upload it to the host.
4. Run ansible-playbook on the host itself, using our uploaded configuration file.

We would still end up wanting to give users the ability to specify #5, but I think this would be a good solution to #9.

[jonmorehouse]

A few other nice side effects of not using ansible-local.py anymore:

• we can store our generated inventory file as a terraform output. Maybe this could allow users of the plugin to "re-deploy"?
• we aren't as tightly coupled to any specific version of ansible
• this is much, much easier to test!

[binarymist]

Hi @jonmorehouse, any update on how this is progressing, if it is?

[sohail-prodevans]

i wanted to write a play for any kind of switch, please help me