---
title: error with homebrew and ansible
date: 2015-11-24
keywords: [mac, homebrew, ansible, error]
---

_quick summary:_ Did you use homebrew to install ansible? Put your host
file in `/usr/local/etc/ansible/hosts`

I've started playing around with [ansible], and thought i'd use
[homebrew] to install in on my mac.

First issue I had was running `ansible all -m ping`:

````
ERROR: Unable to find an inventory file, specify one with -i ?
````

So I created `/etc/ansible/hosts` and put the following in there:

````
[targets]
localhost	ansible_connection=local
````

And try `ansible all -m ping` again. Same error. Damn. it would work
when I specified the host file using the `-i` flag, but I don't want to
do that all the time.

The man page assured me that `/etc/ansible` was the correct place:

````
-i PATH, --inventory=PATH
The PATH to the inventory hosts file, which defaults to /etc/ansible/hosts.
````

A bit of googling reminded me that all homebrew stuff lived under
`/usr/local`, so a simple:

````
mkdir /usr/local/etc/ansible
vi /usr/local/etc/ansible/hosts
````

And adding these lines to the file:

````
[targets]
localhost	ansible_connection=local
````

And trying the `ansible all -m ping` command again resulted in success:

````
localhost | success >> {
    "changed": false,
    "ping": "pong"
}
````

Hooray, first issue easily overcome.

[ansible]: http://www.ansible.com
[homebrew]: http://brew.sh