til/devops/aliasing-an-ansible-host.md

Aliasing An Ansible Host

When specifying the hosts that Ansible can interact with in the /etc/ansible/hosts file, you can put just the IP address of the host server, like so:

192.168.1.50

IP addresses are not particularly meaningful for a person to look at though. Giving it a name serves as better documentation and makes it easier to see what host servers are in play during a task.

Ansible makes it easy to alias host servers. For example, we can name our host staging like so:

staging ansible_host=192.168.1.50

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