community-ansible-dev-tools¶

A container image for Ansible Development Tools (ADT).

This image is built on top of Fedora minimal and has container-in-container support with podman.

The current version in use can be found in the execution-environment.yml file used for the base layer.

Installation¶

podman pull ghcr.io/ansible/community-ansible-dev-tools:latest

Usage¶

Using this as a VS code Dev Container¶

Dev Containers provide you with a containerized development environment in VS code. Details on what they are and how to use them can be found in Developing inside a Container.

This image can be used as an image for a Dev Container where you build and consume Ansible content.

This repository comes with a sample .devcontainer directory with 2 subdirectories - podman and docker each having its own devcontainer.json file.

You can simply copy over the .devcontainer directory to your Ansible project and start using it!

Using this with Github Codespaces¶

To use this image with Github Codespaces, copy the devcontainer.json in this repo to your project and push to Github.

Note: If you are planning to start writing a new Ansible playbook project or collection, use Ansible Creator to scaffold it for you and your project/collection will already have all the .devcontainer files ready.

Using this image as an EE¶

This image can also be used as an Ansible Execution Environment (EE). If you're not familiar with what an EE is, checkout the documentation in Getting started with EE. It is shipped with the following Ansible collections:

ansible.netcommon
ansible.posix
ansible.scm
ansible.utils

You can also create a new EE based on this with more Ansible collections (or Python/System packages) of your choice by using Ansible Builder. Read this documentation to know about ansible-builder.

The below example shows how to make a custom EE that adds the amazon.aws and cisco.nxos collections as well as the ansible-pylibssh python package to this image.

Create an execution-environment.yml file with the following content.

execution-environment.yml

---
version: 3

images:
  base_image:
    name: ghcr.io/ansible/community-ansible-dev-tools:latest

dependencies:
  galaxy: requirements.yml
  python: requirements.txt

options:
  package_manager_path: /usr/bin/dnf5

Populate requirements.txt and requirements.yml with the respective contents.

requirements.txt

ansible-pylibssh==1.1.0

Use ansible-builder to create the new EE.

ansible-builder build -t custom-ee:latest --prune-images -v3

Once this image is built, you can use ansible-navigator to reference this image and run your playbooks!

Using with podman from the command-line¶

If you want to use this image with podman the following command to run the container.

podman run -it --rm \
 --cap-add=SYS_ADMIN \
 --cap-add=SYS_RESOURCE \
 --device "/dev/fuse" \
 --hostname=ansible-dev-container \
 --name=ansible-dev-container \
 --security-opt "apparmor=unconfined" \
 --security-opt "label=disable" \
 --security-opt "seccomp=unconfined" \
 --user=root \
 --userns=host \
 -e SSH_AUTH_SOCK=$SSH_AUTH_SOCK \
 -v $HOME/.gitconfig:/root/.gitconfig \
 -v $PWD:/workdir \
 -v $SSH_AUTH_SOCK:$SSH_AUTH_SOCK \
 ghcr.io/ansible/community-ansible-dev-tools:latest

Note:

The security-opt and cap-add options are used to allow podman to run in the container.
The device option is used to allow the container to access the /dev/fuse device.
userns=host maps the default user account to root user in container.
This command will mount the current directory to /workdir in the container
The SSH agent socket is also mounted to the container to allow for SSH key forwarding.
The user's .gitconfig is mounted to the container to allow for git operations.

Signing git commits (SSH)¶

If the user.signingkey in the gitconfig points directly public key on the file system that key may not be available in the container.

If only one key is preset, the ssh-add command can be used for key retrieval in the user's gitconfig:

~/.gitconfig

[gpg "ssh"]
    defaultKeyCommand = ssh-add -L

Alternatively, the public key can added in-line in the gitconfig