Puppet Bolt multilevel inventory yamls

Question

From the documentation of puppet bolt and their inventory.yaml, here, it seems you can define multiple levels of the yaml file by specifying another group in the definition of agroup. Thus creating a multilevel or nested inventory file.

However I can't find any examples of how to call the nested inventory files with the bolt command from cli.

For instance this yaml from the docmentation:

groups:
  - name: ssh_nodes
    groups:
      - name: webservers
        targets:
          - 192.168.100.179
          - 192.168.100.180
          - 192.168.100.181
      - name: memcached
        targets:
          - 192.168.101.50
          - 192.168.101.60
        config:
          ssh:
            user: root
    config:
      transport: ssh
      ssh:
        user: centos
        private-key: ~/.ssh/id_rsa
        host-key-check: false

How do I call from the ssh_nodes group the webservers group? Normally I use something like this to call a top level group, which in this case the ssh_nodes group.

bolt plan run "deploy::update_package" \
            --targets "ssh_nodes" \
            --user "${BOLT_USER}" \
            --private-key "${KEY}" \
            --modulepath "path/to/module" \
            --inventoryfile "${INVENTORY_FILE}" \
            package_name="${PACKAGE}" \
            package_version="${VERSION}"

Answer 1

Yes, nesting groups is supported. All groups must be uniquely named, irrespective of nesting.

For example, if your inventory looked like this:

groups:
  - name: dc1
    groups:
      - name: webservers
        targets:
          - 192.168.100.179
          - 192.168.100.180
          - 192.168.100.181
  - name: dc2
    groups:
      - name: webservers
        targets:
          - 192.168.101.50
          - 192.168.101.60

Then you attempted to view the inventory, you will get the error:

Tried to redefine group physical for group at ["webservers", "dc2", "all"]

To get around this, I suggest prefixing nested groups like so:

groups:
  - name: dc1
    groups:
      - name: dc1/webservers
        targets:
          - 192.168.100.179
          - 192.168.100.180
          - 192.168.100.181
  - name: dc2
    groups:
      - name: dc2/webservers
        targets:
          - 192.168.101.50
          - 192.168.101.60

Then you can target the groups:

bolt inventory show -t dc2/webservers