Avahi provides local hostname resolution using the .local MDNS Domain. This ansible role installs the required dependencies and configures the DNS resolver accordingly.

You can opt-out from deploying a new /etc/nsswitch.conf config by setting avahi_client__configure_nsswitch to false.

You can opt-in in a simple versionscheck that can prevent you from running a older version of this role by setting submodules_versioncheck to true.

If you want only IPv4 or IPv6 names resolved, change mdns to mdns4 or mdns6 in these variables:

avahi_client__mdns_name: 'mdns'
avahi_client__mdns_minimal_name: 'mdns_minimal'

From the documentation of nss-mdns

mdns resolves both IPv6 and IPv4 addresses, mdns4 only IPv4 addresses and mdns6 only IPv6 addresses. mdns{4,6,}_minimal is mostly identical to the versions without _minimal. However, they differ in one way. The minimal versions will always deny to resolve host names that don't end in .local or addresses that aren't in the range 169.254.x.x (the range used by IPV4LL/APIPA/RFC3927.) Combining the _minimal and the normal NSS modules allows us to make mDNS authoritative for Zeroconf host names and addresses and use it as fallback for everything else.

This role is part of the l3d.avahi Ansible Collection.

Visit the README.md of the l3d.avahi collection for information about downloading or integrating the collection to your ansible playbook.

# ansible-galaxy install l3d.avahi_client

- name: "Let your System use MDNS to resolve .local addresses"
  hosts: localhost
  roles:
    - {role: l3d.avahi_client, tags: avahi}
  vars:
    # Enable optional Versioncheck.
    submodules_versioncheck: true

• DNS-SD http://dns-sd.org/

• mDNS http://www.multicastdns.org/

• Avahi https://www.avahi.org/

• Avahi git https://github.com/lathiat/avahi

• Avahi wiki.archlinux.org

• NSS mdns plugin

• /etc/nsswitch.conf