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