Most of the time, during the course of this book, our playbooks will be running locally and interacting with a cloud provider. The cloud provider, usually, exposes an API over HTTPS. Generally, we need an inventory file, which has a record of all the hosts, for Ansible to run the playbooks. Let us try to work around it.

The easiest way of running a playbook locally is by using the keyword localhost in the playbook as a value for the hosts key. This will save us from creating and managing the inventory file altogether.

Consider the following playbook which we can execute without an inventory:

---
- hosts: localhost
  tasks:
    - name: get value
      debug:
        msg: "The value is: secret-value"

To execute this, we can just run the ansible-playbook command with this playbook:

$ ansible-playbook playbook.yml
[WARNING]: Host file not found: /etc/ansible/hosts
[WARNING]: provided hosts list is empty, only localhost is available
PLAY [localhost] ***************************************************************
TASK [setup] *******************************************************************
ok: [localhost]
TASK [include secret] **********************************************************
ok: [localhost]
TASK [get value] ***************************************************************
ok: [localhost] => {
"msg": "The value is: secret-value"
}
PLAY RECAP *********************************************************************
localhost                  : ok=3    changed=0    unreachable=0    failed=0