Using SSH to open interactive session in ansible

Question

Is there a semi-easy way to use Ansible to open an interactive session?

I've spent a good amount of time making use of keys and other credentials stores to make a stellar ansible inventory file. Problem is, when I want to get on the servers that I can easily manage, I've gotta go out and find those creds and take the time to log into them.

It's almost easier for me just to run adhoc commands with ansible instead of logging in via ssh. Is there a way to pause ansible with a running interactive session so I can get a command prompt? I noticed that sometimes it lets me accept host keys, but other times it bombs out, (I think this happens when running ssh proxy), so I know things can be done interactively.

Answer 1

You could try ansible-console {inventory-host-name}

It mostly feels like you just have a shell open, unless you use and ansible task name as your command, in which case prefixing it with shell <whatever you wanted to run> should work.

It puts you into an interactive ansible console on the connected host.

Answer 2

I recently made myself a small script that seems to do the work. It certainly can be done better but maybe you can get some inspiration:

#!/bin/bash

set -e

if [ -z "$1" ]
 then
    echo "No host patter supplied. Please provide a host pattern that would match only one host form the inventory."
    echo "Usage: ansible-ssh <host_pattern>"
    echo "Example: ./ansible-ssh services[0]"
    exit 1
fi

USER=sysadm
HOST_PATTERN=$1
HOST=`ansible -m shell -a "echo {{ groups.$HOST_PATTERN }}" localhost  | sed 1d`

if grep -q "\[.*\]" <<< "$HOST"; then
  echo "Host pattern $HOST_PATTERN matches more than one host: $HOST"
  exit 1
fi

echo "Connecting to $USER@$HOST..."
ssh $USER@$HOST

Just edit your default USER (in my case sysadm) and execute in the following way:

./ansible-ssh services[0]

Where services is your inventory entry holding one or more IPs.

Answer 3

Here is my solution, which processes variables that Ansible uses to connect hosts, specifically ansible_ssh_common_args, and generates an SSH configuration file and wrapper shell scripts that they use. It consists of a single playbook and a Python script.

Detailed explanation: https://dmrub.github.io/ansible/ssh/2020/10/17/interactive-ssh-with-ansible.html

Source code on github:

https://github.com/dmrub/ansible-ssh-scripts-creator