How to add host to group in Ansible Tower inventory? - ansible

Question

How can I add a host to a group using tower_group or tower_host modules?
The following code creates a host and a group, but they are unrelated to each other:
---
- hosts: localhost
connection: local
gather_facts: false
tasks:
- tower_inventory:
name: My Inventory
organization: Default
state: present
tower_config_file: "~/tower_cli.cfg"
- tower_host:
name: myhost
inventory: My Inventory
state: present
tower_config_file: "~/tower_cli.cfg"
- tower_group:
name: mygroup
inventory: My Inventory
state: present
tower_config_file: "~/tower_cli.cfg"
Docs mention instance_filters parameter ("Comma-separated list of filter expressions for matching hosts."), however do not provide any usage example.
Adding instance_filters: myhost to the tower_group task has no effect.

Answer 1

I solved it using Ansible shell module and tower-cli. I Know that create a ansible module is better than it, but to a fast solution...
- hosts: awx
vars:
tasks:
- name: Create Inventory
tower_inventory:
name: "Foo Inventory"
description: "Our Foo Cloud Servers"
organization: "Default"
state: present
- name: Create Group
tower_group:
inventory: "Foo Inventory"
name: Testes
register: fs_group
- name: Create Host
tower_host:
inventory: "Foo Inventory"
name: "host"
register: fs_host
- name: Associate host group
shell: tower-cli host associate --host "{{fs_host.id}}" --group "> {{fs_group.id}}"

Answer 2

This isn't natively available in the modules included with Tower, which are older and use the deprecated tower-cli package.
But it is available in the newer AWX collection, which uses the awx CLI, as long as you have a recent enough Ansible (2.9 should be fine).
In essence, install the awx collection through a requirements file, or directly like
ansible-galaxy collection install awx.awx -p ./collections
Add the awx.awx collection to your playbook
collections:
- awx.awx
and then use the hosts: option to tower_group:.
- tower_group:
name: mygroup
inventory: My Inventory
hosts:
- myhost
state: present
You can see a demo playbook here.
Be aware though that you may need preserve_existing_hosts: True if your group already contains other hosts. Unfortunately there does not seem to be an easy way to remove a single host from a group.
In terms of your example this would probably work:
---
- hosts: localhost
connection: local
gather_facts: false
collections:
- awx.awx
tasks:
- tower_inventory:
name: My Inventory
organization: Default
state: present
tower_config_file: "~/tower_cli.cfg"
- tower_host:
name: myhost
inventory: My Inventory
state: present
tower_config_file: "~/tower_cli.cfg"
- tower_group:
name: mygroup
inventory: My Inventory
state: present
tower_config_file: "~/tower_cli.cfg"
hosts:
- myhost