Ansible Unable To Parse As An Inventory Source | How To Fix It?

In this article, we'll look at some troubleshooting techniques for the "ansible unable to parse as an inventory source" issue. We at Skynats can take care of your pgAdmin Auto Increment issues with our Server Management Services.

"Ansible Unable To Parse As An Inventory Source" Resulting in error

The Ansible inventory file contains a list of the hosts and clusters of hosts that a playbook's commands, modules, and tasks execute on. The Ansible environment and plugins ascertain which of the numerous file formats the file will be in. INI and YAML are popular file types.

By default, the inventory file is kept in /etc/ansible/hosts. We can also create project-specific inventory files in various locations. The following error may occasionally appear when attempting to run an Ansible Playbook:

We will examine some of the problem-solving strategies in this article.

Ansible Unable To Parse As An Inventory Source Problem Resolution

Some of the ways include:

Approach 1

Before starting the playbook, merely run the following command. Edit the inventory path in /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg to point to the right host file if the error still appears.

ansible all --list-hosts

Approach 2

If the problem arises when we run ansible-playbook -i path/to/inventory/file playbook.yml, then all that needs to be done is to create an empty ansible.cfg file in the directory where our playbook is located.

Approach 3

Visit the root directory.

cd etc or mkdir etc and cd etc

mkdir ansible then cd ansible

vi hosts (then add the hosts)

chmod 777 hosts.

Verify ansible all -m ping

Approach 4

The following error message can occasionally be caused by host files without reading permissions.

[WARNING]: Unable to parse /etc/ansible/hosts as an inventory source
[WARNING]: No inventory was parsed, only implicit localhost is available
[WARNING]: provided hosts list is empty, only localhost is available. Note that
the implicit localhost does not match 'all'

We must modify the permissions in this case.

sudo chmod 744 /etc/ansible/hosts

Approach 5

The following error may also be caused by improper formatting of the host's file:

[WARNING]:  * Failed to parse /etc/ansible/hosts with yaml plugin: YAML
inventory has invalid structure, it should be a dictionary, got: <class
'ansible.parsing.yaml.objects.AnsibleUnicode'>
[WARNING]:  * Failed to parse /etc/ansible/hosts with ini plugin:
/etc/ansible/hosts:3: Expected key=value host variable assignment, got: ;
[WARNING]: Unable to parse /etc/ansible/hosts as an inventory source
[WARNING]: No inventory was parsed, only implicit localhost is available

Here, the format needs to be adjusted.

Approach 6

Use ansible all --list-hosts to determine whether hosts are accessible.

Conclusion

We've included some troubleshooting advice from our Tech support team in this article for the problem "ansible unable to parse as an inventory source."