I’ve been working to manage dynamic inventory in AWS for Ansible deploys… then I came across this stack overflow link & ches’ answer.

Ansible looks for executables and flat files in a directory and merges their results.

=> tree inventory/staging
inventory/staging
-- base
-- ec2.ini
-- ec2.py
-- group_vars -> ../group_vars

The base file looks like:

=>  more inventory/staging/base
[localhost]
# I need to tell Ansible which Python on my system has boto for AWS
127.0.0.1 ansible_python_interpreter=/usr/local/bin/python

# The EC2 plugin will populate these groups, but we need to add empty entries
# here to make aliases for them below.
[tag_Stage_staging]
[tag_Role_webserver]

[staging:children]
tag_Stage_staging

[webservers:children]
tag_Role_webserver

You then just point to the directory for inventory:

$ ansible -i inventory/staging webservers -m ec2_facts
# OR
$ export ANSIBLE_HOSTS=inventory/staging
$ ansible webservers -m ec2_facts