AWX in Action

Ad-Hoc Commands: One-Liners Without a Playbook

To start, we'll execute an ad-hoc command on the nebula host.

Ad-hoc commands are one-off Ansible tasks you run directly against an inventory without writing a playbook, using a single module call.

To test this, navigate to the Inventories menu and select the inventory you wish to target.

For this demonstration, we'll use the NebulaInventory inventory. These are the steps to follow:

• Click on this inventory, then go to the Hosts tab.
• Locate the nebula host in the list, select it, and click on the Run Command button.
• First, choose the module you want to use. For this example, we'll use the shell module, which runs commands on the host.

You can specify arguments for the module. For the shell module, this means the command you want to execute. In this case, we'll run echo "Hello, World!" > /tmp/hello.txt.

• Select the verbosity level. This determines how much information is displayed in the output. Here are the verbosity levels available:

Stay at 0 or 1 for normal runs, jump to 3 when debugging failed tasks, and only go to 4 or 5 when you suspect the transport itself (SSH handshake, WinRM auth) is the problem. Higher levels generate large amounts of output and can leak sensitive data into job logs.

• You can also use the Limit pattern to target specific hosts in the inventory. Leaving the field blank or using all or * will target all hosts in the inventory, but you can also use a pattern to focus on specific ones. For instance, setting Limit to nebula will target the nebula host from the inventory.

• Click on Next