ansible.builtin.hostname module – Manage hostname

Note

This module is part of ansible-core and included in all Ansible installations. In most cases, you can use the short module name hostname even without specifying the collections keyword. However, we recommend you use the Fully Qualified Collection Name (FQCN) ansible.builtin.hostname for easy linking to the module documentation and to avoid conflicting with other collections that may have the same module name.

Synopsis

  • Set system’s hostname. Supports most OSs/Distributions including those using systemd.

  • Windows, HP-UX, and AIX are not currently supported.

Requirements

The below requirements are needed on the host that executes this module.

  • hostname

Parameters

Parameter

Comments

name

string / required

Name of the host.

If the value is a fully qualified domain name that does not resolve from the given host, this will cause the module to hang for a few seconds while waiting for the name resolution attempt to timeout.

use

string

added in Ansible 2.9

Which strategy to use to update the hostname.

If not set we try to autodetect, but this can be problematic, particularly with containers as they can present misleading information.

Note that ‘systemd’ should be specified for RHEL/EL/CentOS 7+. Older distributions should use ‘redhat’.

Choices:

  • "alpine"

  • "debian"

  • "freebsd"

  • "generic"

  • "macos"

  • "macosx"

  • "darwin"

  • "openbsd"

  • "openrc"

  • "redhat"

  • "sles"

  • "solaris"

  • "systemd"

Attributes

Attribute

Support

Description

check_mode

Support: full

Can run in check_mode and return changed status prediction without modifying target, if not supported the action will be skipped.

diff_mode

Support: full

Will return details on what has changed (or possibly needs changing in check_mode), when in diff mode

facts

Support: full

Action returns an ansible_facts dictionary that will update existing host facts

platform

Platform: posix

Target OS/families that can be operated against

Notes

Note

  • This module does NOT modify /etc/hosts. You need to modify it yourself using other modules such as ansible.builtin.template or ansible.builtin.replace.

  • On macOS, this module uses scutil to set HostName, ComputerName, and LocalHostName. Since LocalHostName cannot contain spaces or most special characters, this module will replace characters when setting LocalHostName.

Examples

- name: Set a hostname
  ansible.builtin.hostname:
    name: web01

- name: Set a hostname specifying strategy
  ansible.builtin.hostname:
    name: web01
    use: systemd

Authors

  • Adrian Likins (@alikins)

  • Hideki Saito (@saito-hideki)