Ad-hoc commands in Ansible allow you to execute simple tasks at the command line against one or all of your hosts.

An ad-hoc command consists of two parameters: the host group that defines on what machines to run the task against and the Ansible module to run.

These parameters are passed to the ansible binary for invocation.

Running ad-hoc commands

ping all hosts

$ ansible all -m ping

execute the command “uptime” on all hosts

$ ansible all -m shell -a 'uptime'

run the command disk usage using the inventory json file on all hosts

$ ansible all -i inventory.json -m shell -a 'df -h'

install the package git as root user on the target host using the inventory.yml file

$ ansible test-db-001.mydomain.com -i inventory.yml -b -m package -a "name=git state=present"