How to use a custom inventory file with ansible-bender?

[cryobry]

I'm trying to run ansible-bender on a remote SSH host found in my inventory.

I have tried passing the custom inventory file as an additional argument to ansible-bender:

ansible-bender build --extra-ansible-args "-i ./inventory" ./ab-playbook.yml

...but the inventory is ignored and the image is still built locally. Is there any way to run ansible-bender on the remote host specified in my inventory/playbook?

[themkat]

ansible-bender builds its own inventory, and ignores any existing inventory files. This causes other issues as well, like delegation not working #266.

To my knowledge, there isn't any way to make it work at the moment. Please correct me if I'm wrong @TomasTomecek

[TomasTomecek]

@themkat you're right

ansible-bender in its current architecture cannot work with remote machines - it uses inventory to "connect" to locally running containers.

If you wish to access a remote host, you need to write the inventory and a playbook and invoke ansible-bender inside that playbook, as any other commands you'd want to run on the host.