ansible.builtin.gather_facts module – Gathers facts about remote hosts

Note

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

New in Ansible 2.8

Synopsis

  • This module takes care of executing the configured facts modules, the default is to use the ansible.builtin.setup module.

  • This module is automatically called by playbooks to gather useful variables about remote hosts that can be used in playbooks.

  • It can also be executed directly by /usr/bin/ansible to check what variables are available to a host.

  • Ansible provides many facts about the system, automatically.

Note

This module has a corresponding action plugin.

Parameters

Parameter

Comments

parallel

boolean

A toggle that controls if the fact modules are executed in parallel or serially and in order. This can guarantee the merge order of module facts at the expense of performance.

By default it will be true if more than one fact module is used.

For low cost/delay fact modules parallelism overhead might end up meaning the whole process takes longer. Test your specific case to see if it is a speed improvement or not.

The ansible_facts_parallel variable can be used to set this option, overriding the default, but not the direct assignment of the option in the task.

Choices:

  • false

  • true

Attributes

Attribute

Support

Description

action

Support: full

Indicates this has a corresponding action plugin so some parts of the options can be executed on the controller

async

Support: none

while this action does not support the task ‘async’ keywords it can do its own parallel processing using the parallel option.

Supports being used with the async keyword

bypass_host_loop

Support: none

Forces a ‘global’ task that does not execute per host, this bypasses per host templating and serial, throttle and other loop considerations

Conditionals will work as if run_once is being used, variables used will be from the first available host

This action will not work normally outside of lockstep strategies

check_mode

Support: full

since this action should just query the target system info it always runs in check mode

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

diff_mode

Support: none

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

Platforms: all

The action plugin should be able to automatically select the specific platform modules automatically or can be configured manually

Target OS/families that can be operated against

Notes

Note

  • This is mostly a wrapper around other fact gathering modules.

  • Options passed into this action must be supported by all the underlying fact modules configured.

  • If using gather_timeout and parallel execution, it will limit the total execution time of modules that do not accept gather_timeout themselves.

  • Facts returned by each module will be merged, conflicts will favor ‘last merged’. Order is not guaranteed, when doing parallel gathering on multiple modules.

Examples

# Display facts from all hosts and store them indexed by hostname at /tmp/facts.
# ansible all -m ansible.builtin.gather_facts --tree /tmp/facts

Authors

  • Ansible Core Team