Ad-hoc commands

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Lesson 03 / 13

Before writing a whole playbook, Ansible can run a single module against your inventory directly from the command line — perfect for quick checks or one-off fixes across a fleet.


# is everyone reachable?
ansible all -i inventory.ini -m ping

# run an arbitrary shell command
ansible webservers -i inventory.ini -m shell -a "df -h"

# install a package (the "apt" module, not raw shell)
ansible webservers -i inventory.ini -m apt -a "name=nginx state=present" --become

# copy a file out to every matching host
ansible webservers -i inventory.ini -m copy -a "src=./index.html dest=/var/www/html/index.html"

Flag	Meaning
`-i`	which inventory file to use
`-m`	which module to run (ping, shell, apt, copy, ...)
`-a`	arguments passed to that module
`--become`	escalate privileges (sudo) on the target host

Rule of thumb: ad-hoc commands are for things you'll type once and never need to repeat exactly — checking disk space, restarting a service right now. The moment you'd want to run the same thing again next week, write a playbook instead.

Try it yourselfRun ansible all -i inventory.ini -m shell -a "uptime" against your test hosts. One command, every server's uptime back in seconds — no loop, no SSH-ing in one at a time.

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