Ansible with multiple SSH key pair - ansible

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.