ansible inventory groups not present in variables

[dsavineau]

Not sure if it's a bug or if it's related to the ansible_runner refact done in testinfra 3.0.2

Before 3.0.x release, we were collecting the ansible groups information from the inventory via the ansible variables :

        ansible_vars = host.ansible.get_variables()
        num_mons = len(ansible_vars["groups"]["mons"])

In testinfra 2.1.0 the ansible_vars["groups"] is :

{u'mgrs': [u'cephaio-1', u'cephaio-2', u'cephaio-3'], 'all': [u'cephaio-1', u'cephaio-2', u'cephaio-3'], u'clients': [u'cephaio-1', u'cephaio-2', u'cephaio-3'], u'osds': [u'cephaio-1', u'cephaio-2', u'cephaio-3'], 'ungrouped': [], u'mons': [u'cephaio-1', u'cephaio-2', u'cephaio-3'], u'mdss': [u'cephaio-1', u'cephaio-2', u'cephaio-3'], u'rgws': [u'cephaio-1', u'cephaio-2', u'cephaio-3']}

But with testinfra 3.0.x the groups key isn't defined anymore.

        ansible_vars = host.ansible.get_variables()
>       num_mons = len(ansible_vars["groups"]["mons"])
E       KeyError: 'groups'

The ansible hosts file looks like :

[mons]
cephaio-1
cephaio-2
cephaio-3

[mgrs]
cephaio-1
cephaio-2
cephaio-3

[osds]
cephaio-1
cephaio-2
cephaio-3

[rgws]
cephaio-1
cephaio-2
cephaio-3

[mdss]
cephaio-1
cephaio-2
cephaio-3

[clients]
cephaio-1
cephaio-2
cephaio-3

Is there another way to retrieve this information or is it a bug that breaks backward compatibility ?

[guits]

I would say either it's a regression or we are missing some documentation to migrate from a previous release to 3.0.x

[philpep]

Well, the behavior has changed since we no longer use the python ansible API (see #431) and cli return different results. What get_variables() return has never been specified and isn't in the scope of testinfra, it only rely on underlying ansible API.

Here is an example with testinfra 2.1.0 (python API)

{'inventory_file': '/home/phil/src/testinfra/inventory', 'inventory_dir': '/home/phil/src/testinfra', 'inventory_hostname': 'localhost', 'inventory_hostname_short': 'localhost', 'group_names': ['ungrouped'], 'ansible_facts': {}, 'playbook_dir': '/home/phil/src/testinfra', 'ansible_playbook_python': '/home/phil/venvs/testinfra/bin/python', 'groups': {'all': ['cauchy', 'localhost', 'aldo'], 'ungrouped': ['localhost'], 'g1': ['aldo'], 'g2': ['cauchy']}, 'omit': '__omit_place_holder__eb8289929eac04f305581e420c28e00c04b30062', 'ansible_version': {'string': '2.7.9', 'full': '2.7.9', 'major': 2, 'minor': 7, 'revision': 9}, 'ansible_check_mode': False, 'ansible_diff_mode': False, 'ansible_forks': 5, 'ansible_inventory_sources': 'inventory', 'ansible_skip_tags': [], 'ansible_run_tags': [], 'ansible_verbosity': 0}

And now with testinfra 3.0.2 (CLI)

{'inventory_hostname': 'localhost', 'group_names': ['ungrouped']}

I think only groups is actually useful, so I think we can add it manually in testinfra to have kind of backward compatibility on this...