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- A completely different category

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is Using Plugin-Based Inventory.

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Let's go check it out.

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So inventory can be written in any format,

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which is the old format.

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It's still a very common format.

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The new alternative is the YAML format.

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An inventory since Ansible 2.4
is managed through plugins.

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The ansibe.cfg lists
which plugins are used

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in the inventory section,

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if you're using inventory
based plugins at least.

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Notice that you may have never seen it

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because inventory based plugins
are still not very common

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because the ini format is
so simple and so convenient

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for many environments.

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Both using plugins allows Ansible

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to support new inventory format

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by just providing a new plugin.

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So it makes it a lot more flexible.

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We have the ini plugin,
which is a default,

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which supports old cell inventory format.

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We have the script plugin

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which supports old cell dynamic inventory.

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Dynamic inventory, where
in the in the old days

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you would fetch dynamic inventory scripts

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from the community websites.

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There's a YAML plugin, which
supports new cell YAML format.

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And these are the options and
you need to enable the plugins

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that you want to support
in your ansible.cfg.

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And notice that using plugins

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is preferred over dynamic
inventory scripts.

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Before continuing let's
check out the ansible.cfg

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for the current plugins that are used.

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So here we are.

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I'm going to show you sudu vim

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on etc/ansible/ansible.cfg.

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And we are going to look for inventory.

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This is not the one, oops.

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I want the next one and the next one.

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This is what we are looking
for, inventory plugins.

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Inventory plugins is use
the share ansible plugins

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inventory, or that's
just the plugins path.

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What else do we have?

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There we go.

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We can see the inventory
section right here.

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This is what it should be looking like.

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And you can see that the
enable inventory plugins,

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the default is set to
host_list, script, auto, yaml,

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ini and toml

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and you can see these settings right here.

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Do remember if you want to use plugins

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you need this enabled plugins
in your local ansible.cfd.

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I'm just showing it here to
show you what is hard coded

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as a default.

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And as it is coded as a default,

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you don't really have to specify it

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but if you want to do something specific

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apart from the common inventory plugin,

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you will need to open an inventory section

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in your ansible.cfg to provide that.

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Good, let's check out
some of these formats.

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So here we have an example
where the ini plugin is used.

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This is what we've seen
throughout in this course.

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So you have the group
name, below the group name

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which is between square brackets.

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You have the list of the hosts

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and you can specify Nestle groups as well

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which is what we see
in [Allserver:children]

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where web servers and dbservers
are a member of all servers.

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Right, if you would be
using the yaml plugin

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then this is what it looks like.

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So the parent level group is all servers,

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children is defining the children

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and we have webservers,
dbservice and so on.

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You can also put your variables,
you can put everything

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in this yaml based plugin.

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Hey before you are going to
work with these inventories

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I do need to show you the
documentation behind the plugins.

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So if you use ansible.docs
-t inventory -l,

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we get a list,

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oh, ansible-doc of course.

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We get a list of all the
different inventory types.

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And did you know that every inventory type

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has its own documentation?

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So we use ini and here
we can see the example

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for ini based inventory,

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including variables and everything

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that you might want to do.

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We use YAML and there you can see

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what it looks like all
the way to the bottom

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for the YAML based inventory.

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You are going to appreciate this example

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because it's telling you
how exactly to compose it

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including the variables
that you might be including

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at a specific level.

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And what else do we have?

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Well, let's get back to the
list and let's have a look

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at one of the sources
that is not so common.

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Kubernetes for instance.

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So -t inventory Kubernetes

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and there we go.

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We see the example that can be used

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for Kubernetes based inventory.

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Ooh, this is all about
Kubernetes authentication

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which means you are going to
hand it over to Kubernetes.

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That is what corresponds

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to the old scripting style inventory.

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And you can use some references

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to other scripting style
inventories as well.

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Like Azure Resource Manager,

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like foreman, like Docker machine,

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like just a host list,

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like openshift or openstack or whatever.

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Now we should focus at this point on ini

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in YAML based inventories.

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We will see these specific
inventories later.

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So let's get back to the slides

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and talk about inventory
script conversion.

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So ini based inventory is the standard,

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but you might want to move
over to YAML based inventory

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which seems to be the future anyway.

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You can easily convert using
the Ansible inventory command.

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So for instance, use

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ansible-inventory --yaml
-i inventory --list

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- -output inventory.yaml.

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So let me just demonstrate how to do that

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based on the inventory that
we are going to use later

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in the windows,

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in the lesson about windows.

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But important, when ini-based
inventory contains variables,

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they maybe messed up after conversion

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and you should always check

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because you might have to manually fix it.

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Of course you can easily avoid it

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by using the approach of
putting your variables

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in group_vars/ and host_vars/.

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Hey, I'm mentioning the
recommended approach here.

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I think it's time to think
about the recommendation

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where to put your inventory variables

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because how are you going to
use group_vars/ and host_vars/

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if you're using Ansible tower,

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then you might need to be to get back

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to inventory based variables anyway.

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So that is really something to think about

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but more about tower in the next lesson.

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For now, let's check out this conversion.

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So in order to show you the conversion,

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let's go to the windows directory.

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That's a project directory
that we will discuss

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in more detail later.

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For now I only want to have a look at

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the inventory where you can see

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that there are three groups

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and there are variables for the group win.

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And that is what makes
this an interesting one.

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So if I wanna do the conversion,

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then ansible-inventory
--yaml to specify the format

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- i inventory --list
--output winventory.yaml.

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So that is creating winventory.yaml.

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And there we go, we can
see that the conversion

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actually has worked pretty well.

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So it works with the
implicit host group all,

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we don't see that anywhere
in the original inventory

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but it's an implicit
host group so it's there,

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which is children,

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children file and lamp and ungrouped.

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Ungrouped are the hosts that
are a member of no group at all

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that doesn't apply in this case.

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Then we have win.

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And in win we have the hosts

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and the host windows.example.com.

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And here we have all
the variables that apply

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to that specific host.

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That is looking pretty good.

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Let's get back to the slide one more time

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because we need to talk
about inventory sources

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a little bit more to make sure

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you fully understand what's going on.

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So inventory is just
discussed as plugin-based.

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You can use ansible-doc -t inventory -l

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for a complete list.

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We've already seen it.

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The inventory enabled plugins
option in ansible.cfg,

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as how you determine what
plugins needs to be enabled.

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So here we can see an
example where host_list

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and script and auto and
yaml and ini and toml,

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all of them are enabled.

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And if you are using
legacy inventory scripts,

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they are still supported
because of the script plugin.

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That's a nice backward compatibility

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that is implemented and that goes

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without any additional work.

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And if you wanna use
additional inventory plugins,

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you need to add them in product based

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or generic ansible.cfg.

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Well, let's make sure you understand this.

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This product based or generic ansible.cfg,

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they are not merged.

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So either in product based
where no generic ansible.cfg

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is considered or in generic ansible.cfg,

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if you don't have a
project based inventory.

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Use a fully qualified collection name

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if the plugin is a part of a collection.

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And that's all you need
to know about inventories.