ANSIBLE.SETUP(3)

NAME
setup - Gathers facts about remote hosts

DESCRIPTION

This module is automatically called by playbooks to gather useful variables about remote hosts that can be used in playbooks. It can also be executed directly by /usr/bin/ansible to check what variables are available to a host. Ansible provides many facts about the system, automatically.

OPTIONS

filter
    if supplied, only return facts that match this shell-style (fnmatch) wildcard. (default: *)(Added in Ansible version 1.1.)

NOTES

More ansible facts will be added with successive releases. If facter or ohai are installed, variables from these programs will also be snapshotted into the JSON file for usage in templating. These variables are prefixed with facter_ and ohai_ so it's easy to tell their source. All variables are bubbled up to the caller. Using the ansible facts and choosing to not install facter and ohai means you can avoid Ruby-dependencies on your remote systems. (See also facter and ohai.)

The filter option filters only the first level subkey below ansible_facts.
# Display facts from all hosts and store them indexed by I(hostname) at C(/tmp/facts).
ansible all -m setup --tree /tmp/facts
# Display only facts regarding memory found by ansible on all hosts and output them.
ansible all -m setup -a 'filter=ansible_*_mb'
# Display only facts returned by facter.
ansible all -m setup -a 'filter=facter_*'
# Display only facts returned by facter.
ansible all -m setup -a 'filter=ansible_eth[0-2]'

AUTHOR
Michael DeHaan

SEE ALSO
ansible(1), http://ansible.github.com/modules.html#setup