Can't use ansible inventory file because it is executable

Question

I am trying to run an Ansible inventory file ansible -i hosts-prod all -u root -m ping and it is failing with this message:

ERROR: The file hosts-prod is marked as executable, 
but failed to execute correctly. If this is not supposed 
to be an executable script, correct this with 
`chmod -x hosts-prod`.

I believe this is because I am using Virtual Box and shared folders which is forcing all my files to ug+rwx. And vbox does not permit changing permissions on shared folders (at least shared folders coming from Windows which is my situation)

Is there a way to allow Ansible to run this file? I can see several options:

1. Edit hosts-prod to become an executable file. I don't know what's involved in this (being new to Ansible, obviously).
2. Set a configuration option in Ansible to tell it not to run this file as executable - just treat it as the static configuration file it is. I can't find an option to do this, so I suspect it's not possible.
3. Move the file outside of shared-folders: not an option in my case.
4. Your better idea..

All assistance/ideas appreciated!

The actual hosts-prod config file looks as follows, so any tips on making it internally executable would be welcome:

web01 ansible_ssh_host=web01.example.com
db01 ansible_ssh_host=db01.example.com

[webservers]
web01

[dbservers]
db01

[all:vars]
ansible_ssh_user=root

Answer 1

Executable inventories are parsed as JSON instead of ini files, so you can convert it to a script that outputs JSON. On top of that, Ansible passes some arguments to them to a simple 'cat' isn't enough:

#!/bin/bash
cat <<EOF
{
 "_meta": {
   "hostvars": {
     "host1": { "some_var": "value" }
   }
 },
 "hostgroup1": [
   "host1",
   "host2"
 ]
 ...
}
EOF

Not as elegant as a simple 'cat', but should work.

Answer 2

@hkariti's answer is first and closest to the original question. I ended up re-writing the config file entirely into a Ruby script and that is working fine. I thought I'd share that code here since finding complete examples for Ansible dynamic inventory files wasn't super easy for me. The file is different from a static file in how you associate variables with machine listings in the inventory (using the _meta tag)..

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
# this file must be executable (chmod +x) in order for ansible to use it
require 'json'
module LT
  module Ansible
    def self.staging_inventory
      {
        local: {
          hosts:["127.0.0.1"],
          vars: { 
            ansible_connection: "local"
          }
        },
        common: {
          hosts: [],
          children: ["web", "db"],
          vars: {
            ansible_connection: "ssh",
          }
        },
        web: {
          hosts: [],
          children: ["web_staging"]
        },
        db: {
          hosts: [],
          children: ["db_staging"]
        },
        web_staging: {
          hosts: ["webdb01-ci"],
          vars: {
            # server specific vars here
          }
        },
        db_staging: {
          hosts: ["webdb01-ci"]
        }
      }
    end
  end
end
# ansible will pass "--list" to this file when run from command line
# testing for --list should let us require this file in code libraries as well
if ARGV.find_index("--list") then
  puts LT::Ansible::staging_inventory.to_json
end

Answer 3

I see an answer is accepted already, however let me provide an alternate answer.

The file you are trying to parse as an asible inventory is an executable file, meaning it has an executable permissions on it. If you run ls -l hosts-prod you will see something like -rwxrwxr-x in the output. x means the file is executable.

From your out of the file it looks like it is just a static inventory file so if you remove the executable permission it should work like a static inventory file.

chmod -x hosts-prod