Ansible - Parsing CSV List Of Hosts (IP, hostname(s), MAC)

Recently I had a need to take an already populated spreadsheet which contained a list of hostnames, generic names, IP addresses and MAC addresses and convert them to a usable YAML format to be used with Ansible. This is something I had attempted previously but was not very successful, however I gave it another shot. This time I went ahead and took the time to create a Python script to use as a generator to create the inventory in order to test many times with different datasets and to also share with others to do the same. The good news is that I was successful this time around so I wanted to share this with others.

The Ansible playbook is pretty straight forward as seen below. I attempted the Ansible csvfile lookup at first and it was not as flexible as I had hoped for so I ended up just leveraging the file lookup instead.

The Jinja2 template ended up to be equally as straightforward as seen below.

As mentioned in the beginning of the post, I wanted a way to generate some random datasets using a Python script. And that script is below.

To generate a dataset using the above script all that is required is to adjust the variables in the beginning of the script to my specific needs and then execute the script as below:

./hostipmacgen.py

After running the above script we now have a random inventory generated for 1000 hosts in a CSV file and ready for us to parse this to YAML in the next section.

Now that we have our CSV generated from above we can now run the Ansible playbook to parse this data to YAML for us.

ansible-playbook interate_csv.yml

And once the above playbook runs (~5 secs.) we now have this handy usable YAML file ready for us to do some Ansible goodness with. Your options are wide open at this point!

And there you have it. An easy way to parse some data from a spreadsheet exported as a CSV file and easily becoming available for consumption by Ansible!

Enjoy!