coglinev3.ansible_bender

Ansible Role: ansible_bender

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Tired of using Dockerfiles to build containers?

This role sets up ansible-bender, a tool that helps you create containers using Ansible playbooks, turning them into container images.

With ansible-bender, you can build and set up containers the same way you do for virtual machines or physical systems. You can use the power of Ansible and reuse your existing Ansible content for your container setups. You can use templates, copy files, add encrypted data, handle errors, add conditions, and more—all with Ansible's orchestration features during the image building process.

The supported Linux distributions for this role are:

Alpine Linux 3.14,
Alpine Linux 3.15,
Alpine Linux 3.16,
Alpine Linux 3.17,
Alpine Linux 3.18,
Alpine Linux 3.19,
Enterprise Linux 8,
Enterprise Linux 9,
Debian 11 (Bullseye),
Debian 12 (Bookworm),
Linux Mint 20 (Ulyana),
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa),
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish).

NOTE

The rootless mode for Podman needs the newuidmap program installed. Enterprise Linux 7 (RHEL 7 / CentOS 7) supports this only from version 7.7.

Requirements

Ansible-bender needs a few programs installed on your host system:

Buildah
Podman
Python 3.6 or later (Python 3.5 or earlier are not supported)
Ansible (Ansible must be made with Python 3)

All these requirements can be installed with this role.

Role Variables

Here's a list of variables you can customize, along with their default values (see defaults/main.yml):

# Required programs for ansible-bender (buildah, podman, python3.6 or higher)
ab_dependencies:
  - buildah
  - podman
  - python3
  - python3-pip
  - python3-setuptools
  - python3-software-properties
  - python3-virtualenv
  - procps
  - runc
  - slirp4netns

# Package state for dependencies: ( present ) | latest 
ab_dependencies_package_state: present

# Python packages installed with pip3.
ab_python_packges:
  - wheel
  - ansible
  - ansible-bender

# Package state for Python packages: ( present ) | latest
ab_python_packge_state: present

# List of container registries, separated by commas
ab_container_search_registry: "'docker.io', 'registry.fedoraproject.org', 'quay.io', 'registry.access.redhat.com', 'registry.centos.org'"

# List of users that can use rootless mode:
ab_users: []

Dependencies

None.

Example Playbook

---
# file: roles/ansible-bender/tests/test.yml

- hosts: all
  vars:
    ab_users:
      - your_username
  roles:
    - { role: coglinev3.ansible_bender }

Example of using ansible-bender

Create an image

To test ansible-bender, you need an Ansible playbook first. Create a playbook template with:

ansible-bender init

Next, edit the playbook.yml file. Modify the ansible_bender dictionary variable and add tasks. Here’s a simple example that creates an nginx container based on Alpine Linux.

---
- name: Containerized version of nginx
  hosts: all
  vars:
    # Configuration for ansible-bender
    ansible_bender:
      # ansible-bender needs an image with preinstalled Python 3 
      base_image: python:3-alpine
      target_image:
        # Command to run by default when starting the container
        cmd: "nginx -g \"daemon off;\""
        name: bender-nginx
        ports: ['80', '443']
        working_dir: /var/www/localhost/htdocs
        labels:
          build-by: "{{ ansible_user }}"
      working_container:
        volumes:
        # Mount this git repo to the working container at /src
        - "{{ playbook_dir }}:/src:Z"
  tasks:
  - name: Install dependencies needed for the bender-nginx project
    apk:
      name: nginx
      state: present
  - name: Ensure directory /run/nginx exists
    file:
      path: /run/nginx
      state: directory
      mode: '0750'
      owner: nginx
      group: nginx