If you know about ansible-console you can ignore this. If you don't this might be of use to you.
Something found out recently is that Ansible has an interactive REPL of sorts in ansible-console for doing some adhoc things on a collection of hosts.
Using it is pretty simple
> ansible-console -i preproduction
Welcome to the ansible console.
Type help or ? to list commands.
jamhughes@all (3)[f:5]$
This will bring you into the shell itself,
the
-i preproductiontells the console to use a certain hosts file (in my case preproduction).
From here you can use the normal ansible modules. So for example if I wanted to get the date on all the hosts I can do this,
jamhughes@all (3)[f:5]$ shell date
frontend1.preproduction | SUCCESS | rc=0 >>
Tue Jan 10 22:04:18 GMT 2017
frontend2.preproduction | SUCCESS | rc=0 >>
Tue Jan 10 22:04:18 GMT 2017
backend1.preproduction | SUCCESS | rc=0 >>
Tue Jan 10 22:04:18 GMT 2017
If you have specific groups you want to work in you can cd into groups
jamhughes@all (3)[f:5]$ cd frontend
jamhughes@customer (3)[f:5]$ shell date
frontend1.preproduction | SUCCESS | rc=0 >>
Tue Jan 10 22:04:18 GMT 2017
frontend2.preproduction | SUCCESS | rc=0 >>
Tue Jan 10 22:04:18 GMT 2017
I guess it flies in the face of all this immutable infrastructure stuff but hey we are not all there yet and stuff like this can be handy.