Ansible change ssh port in playbook

Question

Here is the inventory file

---
[de-servers]
192.26.32.32

[uk-servers]
172.21.1.23
172.32.2.11

and my playbook is look like this:

Answer 1

The only thing I can think of that might work would be to create ssh aliases for your hosts. In your .ssh/config:

Host de.1.before
  HostName 192.26.32.32
  Port 22

Host de.1.after
  HostName 192.26.32.32
  Port 8888

Then use these aliases in your Ansible inventory:

[de-servers-before]
de.1.before

[de-servers-after]
de.1.after

And the defined groups then respectively in your plays:

- name: Install de-servers configurations
  hosts: de-servers-before
  roles:
    - de-server-setup

- name: Install uk-servers configurations
  hosts: uk-servers  
  roles:
    - uk-server-setup

- name: Do some other job on de-servers (cannot be done until uk-servers is installed)
  hosts: de-servers-after
  roles:
    - de-servers-rest-of-jobs

Answer 2

I would suggest to put the port number on the inventory file. Like the following example.

[linux-servers]
xcpng5.homelab.com ansible_port=3511
xcpng2.homelab.com ansible_port=3522
xcpng1.homelab.com ansible_port=3523

I was trying to achieve the same and that helped me to set up different ssh port.

Answer 3

In your inventory file you can define the ssh port like this

---

[de-servers]

192.26.32.32:8888

[uk-servers]

172.21.1.23:8888

172.32.2.11:8888

Answer 4

Below is my example for connecting with different ssh port using ansible-playbook.

---
- hosts: test-server
  vars:
        ansible_ssh_user: 'rohit'
        ansible_password: '123456'
        ansible_port: '2222'
  tasks:
        - name: "print simple command"
          command: cat /usr/bin/myscript.sh

Answer 5

Easy way, edit /etc/ansible/hosts:

[my_server]
ssdnodes:54321

and you can test it by issuing a ping:

ansible ssdnodes -m ping

and the response would be:

ssdnodes | SUCCESS => {
    "changed": false,
    "ping": "pong"
}

Answer 6

I need to change the ssh ports on the hosts I manage and I want to use Ansible to do it. Essentially, Ansible uses the following logic to manage it's SSH connections:

    if self.port is not None:
        ssh -p {{ self.port }} ...
    else:
        ssh ...

where "self.port" is the port specification from the host inventory, or an override via the "-e" parameter, or an explicit declaration of the variables "ansible_port" and/or "ansible_ssh_port". The recommended solution to changing ports is to employ the "wait_for" and "when" modules in "pre_tasks", but there are many inadequacies to this approach, particularly when many hosts are involved and especially when you want to use different ports on different hosts.

I cloned and patched the ssh plugin (versions 1 and 2) to change the logic as follows:

if self.port is not None and self.port is OPEN:
    ssh -p {{ self.port }} ...
else:
    ssh ...

The patch, by itself, makes no changes on the target nodes but allows connections to succeed even if the ports on the nodes haven't changed yet. With the patch, it is now very easy to write roles/tasks to change ssh ports to whatever is in the host inventory.

If you're interested, you can find the patch and samples of how use it at https://github.com/crlb/ansible; the README.md contains additional information.