Ansible Role: ansible_container

This role is designed to work with Ansible-Bender for creating containers which include:

• Ansible,
• OpenSSH, and
• Systemd or Init V.

These containers act like virtual machines and are useful for testing Ansible roles, such as in GitHub actions.

The role supports the following Linux distributions:

• Alpine Linux versions 3.12 to 3.19,
• Amazon Linux 2023,
• Debian versions 10 (Buster) to 12 (Bookworm),
• Enterprise Linux versions 7 to 9,
• Fedora versions 34 to 39,
• Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver), 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa), and 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish).

Requirements

To create new container images using this role, you need to install ansible-bender. You can get it through my galaxy role coglinev3.ansible_bender.

Role Variables

Here are the available variables along with their default values (see defaults/main.yml):

# Use sudo or not
ansible_container_become: true

# State for installed packages: absent | present | latest
ansible_container_package_state: latest

# Requirements for Debian
ansible_container_requirements:
  - libssl-dev
  - libffi-dev
  - openssh-server
  - python3-apt
  - python3-pip
  - python3-setuptools
  - python3-software-properties
  - python3-wheel
  - systemd
  - sudo

# Force a new Ansible configuration file /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg
ansible_container_force_config: "no"

# Force a new Ansible inventory file /etc/ansible/hosts
ansible_container_force_inventory: "no"

# Define an Ansible user and group
ansible_container_user: ansible
ansible_container_group: ansible

# Variables for Ansible configuration file ansible.cfg
# Forces color mode even without a TTY or when “nocolor” is True
ansible_config_force_color: true

# Control the interpreter discovery behavior:
ansible_config_interpreter_python: auto

Dependencies

There are no dependencies.

Example Playbooks

Playbook to test this role on a virtual machine

---
# file: roles/ansible_container/tests/test.yml

- hosts: localhost
  remote_user: root
  roles:
    - { role: coglinev3.ansible_container }
  vars:
    ansible_container_become: true

Playbook to create a CentOS 7 image with Ansible and Systemd using ansible-bender

---
- name: Containerized version of CentOS 7 with ansible
  hosts: all
  vars:
    # Configuration specific for ansible-bender
    ansible_bender:
      base_image: centos:7
      target_image:
        # Command to run by default when starting the container
        cmd: /usr/sbin/init
        name: centos:7-ansible
        labels:
          build-by: "Cogline.v3"
        volumes:
          - /sys/fs/cgroup
  tasks:
  - name: Include role ansible_container
    include_role:
      name: ansible_container
    vars:
      ansible_container_become: false

To build the new container image, run the following command:

ansible-bender build ./playbook.yml

Version

Release: 1.17.0

License

BSD

Author Information

Copyright © 2024 Cogline.v3.