Ansible with multiple SSH key pair

Question

I am new to Ansible. I am able to test it and its working fine with my test requirment. For making connection between management node and the client node I am using already created ssh key pair. How can I use another node with different SSH key pair? For reference I am considering 3 ec2-instance with different key pairs.

Answer 1

Good news- in a basic use case, this is fairly easy. Simply use the ansible_ssh_private_key_file parameter in your Ansible inventory.

Here are some examples purloined from my personal file:

$ cat hosts.ini  [server1] 54.1.2.3 ansible_ssh_private_key_file=~/.ssh/server1.pem  [testservers] ec2-54-2-3-4.compute-1.amazonaws.com ansible_ssh_private_key_file=~/.ssh/aws-testserver.pem ansible_ssh_user=ubuntu ec2-54-2-3-5.compute-1.amazonaws.com ansible_ssh_private_key_file=~/.ssh/aws-testserver.pem ansible_ssh_user=ubuntu  [piwall] 10.0.0.88 ansible_ssh_private_key_file=~/.ssh/raspberrypi.pem ansible_ssh_user=pi 

Answer 2

tedder42 is correct, however, there is a better way of doing it.

See ansible_ssh_private_key_file here.

I have in my host files the following

# SSH Keys configuration  [all_servers:vars] ansible_ssh_private_key_file = <YOUR PRIVATE KEY LOCATION>   # Server configuration [all_servers:children] elastic_servers nginx_servers  [elastic_servers] 44.22.11.22 44.55.66.77 22.11.22.33  [nginx_servers] 22.24.123.123 233.111.222.11 

If you have multiple keys configuration, you can do something like the following

[nginx:vars] ansible_ssh_private_key_file = <YOUR PRIVATE KEY LOCATION> [app:vars] ansible_ssh_private_key_file = <YOUR 2nd PRIVATE KEY LOCATION>  [nginx:children] nginx_servers  [app:children] app_servers  [nginx_servers] 1.2.3.4 [app_servers] 5.5.5.5 6.6.6.6 

That's way cleaner than tedder42 answer. This is useful if you have multiple keys for multiple servers.

Otherwise, you can include your key in ansible.cfg file instead.