How to use a public keypair .pem file for ansible playbooks?

Question

I want to use a public aws keypair .pem file for running ansible playbooks. I want to do this without changing my ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub and I can't create a new keypair from my current ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub and apply it to the ec2 instances I am trying to change.

$ ansible --version ansible 1.9.6   configured module search path = None 

Here is my hosts file (note that my actual ip is replaced with 1.2.3.4). This is probably the issue since I need a way to set a public key variable and use that:

[all_servers:vars] ansible_ssh_private_key_file = ./mykeypair.pem  [dashboard] 1.2.3.4 dashboard_domain=my.domain.info  

Here is my playbook:

--- - hosts: dashboard   gather_facts: False   remote_user: ubuntu    tasks:     - name: ping       ping: 

This is the command I am using to run it:

ansible-playbook -i ./hosts test.yml 

It results in the following error:

fatal: [1.2.3.4] => SSH Error: Permission denied (publickey).     while connecting to 1.2.3.4:22 

There is no problem with my keypair:

$ ssh -i mykeypair.pem [email protected] 'whoami' ubuntu 

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Ok little mistakes I guess you can't have spaces in host file variables and need to define the group you are applying the vars to. This hosts file works with it all:

[dashboard:vars] ansible_ssh_private_key_file=./mykeypair.pem  [dashboard] 1.2.3.4 dashboard_domain=my.domain.info  

Answer 2

I have come across this and all what I had to do was to run the below

#ssh-agent bash #ssh-add ~/.ssh/keypair.pem