Allow usage of extra vars in ansible.builtin.generator inventory plugin, enabling the dynamic generation of inventory host names at runtime.

[Roysav]

Summary

Use Cases

VM Creation

• Scenario: Using Ansible to both create VMs and configure them. Consistency in hostname generation is critical to ensure seamless transitions between creation and configuration phases.
• Solution: By enabling the ansible.builtin.generator plugin to use extra vars, it will be possible to dynamically generate consistent hostnames based on variables provided at runtime. This ensures consistency across already existing virtual machines (that may be sourced from dynamic inventory plugin) and newly created virtual machines. This consistency is important for the use of group_vars and host_vars in the configuration phase.

Issue Type

Feature Idea

Component Name

plugins/inventory/generator.py

Additional Information

In inventory.yaml file:

plugin: ansible.builtin.generator
hosts:
    # The `region` variable is provided at runtime
    name: "{{ region }}{{ machine_type }}"
layers:
    machine_type:
        - web
        - db

Running:

ansible-inventory -i inventory.yaml -e region=region10 --list

Should output:

@all:
  |--@ungrouped:
  |  |--region10web
  |  |--region10db

Code of Conduct

• I agree to follow the Ansible Code of Conduct

[ansibot]

Files identified in the description:

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