Disable Ansible gather facts from the command line

Question

To speed up execution of Ansible playbooks, I occasionally want to disable gathering facts during the setup phase. This can be done in the playbook by adding:

gather_facts: False

but how can it be controlled in the command line?

I execute my Ansible playbook like this:

ansible-playbook playbook.yaml -i inventory.yaml

Answer 1

You can use the ANSIBLE_GATHERING environment variable:

ANSIBLE_GATHERING=explicit ansible-playbook playbook.yaml -i inventory.yaml

In this way, gathering facts is disabled unless the play has explicitly set gather_facts: True.