Ansible not able to find host from inventory

Question

I am trying to run a playbook on a selective host after it has been provisioned using earlier set of tasks

I am able to ping the host and the same is available in the /etc/ansible/hosts file however the play says skipping: no hosts matched and does not run.

Ansible hosts file looks like below

vm1  ansible_host=192.168.200.52

I have tried mentioning the inventory file using -i with no success, what could be wrong here ?

UPDATE: Added the /etc/ansible/hosts as default inventory however the playbook still says its not able to see the VM

Answer 1

Ansible hosts file looks like below

vm1  ansible_host=192.168.200.52

Q: "I have tried mentioning the inventory file using -i with no success, what could be wrong here?"

A: To see what's wrong run the command below

$ ansible-inventory -i hosts --list

The output should give

{
    "_meta": {
        "hostvars": {
            "vm1": {
                "ansible_host": "192.168.200.52"
            }
        }
    }, 
    "all": {
        "children": [
            "ungrouped"
        ]
    }, 
    "ungrouped": {
        "hosts": [
            "vm1"
        ]
    }
}

A simple playbook

- hosts: vm1
  gather_facts: false
  tasks:
    - debug:
        var: ansible_host

should give

$ ansible-playbook -i hosts playbook.yml
...
ok: [vm1] => {
    "ansible_host": "192.168.200.52"