Run ansible playbook on specified host and group?

Question

Let's suppose that we have host group dev with corresponding group vars.

[dev]
host1
host2

How to run ansible playbook with a host3 that is not in group dev using CLI?

Answer 1

You can specify a host not in inventory with an extra -i. You have to use a comma separated list with a trailing comma to make it work:

ansible-playbook -i 'my-inventory.ini' -i 'host3,' playbook.yaml

I don't know how to associate host3 with a group like dev from the CLI, so if you've got other stuff in the inventory, you could restrict it like this:

ansible-playbook -i 'my-inventory.ini' -i 'host3,' playbook.yaml --limit 'dev:host3'

Of course, that'll only work if your playbook doesn't explicitly need to reference the dev group, and uses all instead.