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.