Add support for extra vars in ansible.builtin.generator plugin

[Roysav]

Reference

This pull request addresses issue #83270

Summary

Use Cases

VM Creation

• Scenario: Using Ansible to both create VMs and configure them. Consistency in hostname generation is critical to ensure seamless transitions between creation and configuration phases.
• Solution: By enabling the ansible.builtin.generator plugin to use extra vars, it will be possible to dynamically generate consistent hostnames based on variables provided at runtime. This ensures consistency across already existing virtual machines (that may be sourced from dynamic inventory plugin) and newly created virtual machines. This consistency is important for the use of group_vars and host_vars in the configuration phase.

Issue Type

• Feature Pull Request

Component Name

plugins/inventory/generator.py

Additional Information

In inventory.yaml file:

plugin: ansible.builtin.generator
hosts:
    # The `region` variable is provided at runtime
    name: "{{ region }}{{ machine_type }}"
layers:
    machine_type:
        - web
        - db

Running:

ansible-inventory -i inventory.yaml -e region=region10 --list

Should output:

@all:
  |--@ungrouped:
  |  |--region10web
  |  |--region10db

[bcoca]

This breaks backwards compatibility, add a new option (see constructed, use_extra_vars, use_vars_plugins) . After that you should add a changelog and tests. https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/reference_appendices/release_and_maintenance.html#generating-changelogs