If you have an Ansible inventory file that includes lots of per host variables, it’s not unusual for lines to get long enough that they become unwieldly, particularly if you want to discuss them in an email or write about them in some context (e.g., a blog post).

I’ve just submitted pull request #14359 to Ansible which implements support for folding long lines using the INI-format convention of using indent to mark extended logical lines.

With this patch in place, you can turn this:

myhost ansible_host=a.b.c.d ansible_user=alice ansible_become=true ansible_ssh_extra_args="-F ~/.ssh/specialconfig"

Into this:

myhost
  ansible_host=a.b.c.d
  ansible_user=alice
  ansible_become=true
  ansible_ssh_extra_args="-F ~/.ssh/specialconfig"

I think that’s a lot easier to read.

If you think this is a good idea (or not!), feel free to comment on the #14359 . I considered (and implemented, then discarded) using a backslash-based model instead…

myhost \
  ansible_host=a.b.c.d \
  ...

…but I was swayed by the fact that the indent-style model is at least documented somewhere, and with the backslash model it’s easy to end up with something like this:

myhost \
  ansible_host=a.b.c.d  # <--- OOOPS NO BACKSLASH
  ansible_user=alice \
  ansible_become=true