Ansible Local Runner

This project gives a simple Ansible Docker image to run Ansible locally in a Docker container. From Docker side, it provides the Dockerfile to build the image and a Docker Compose to run the container. As examples, an inventory file is provided, with only one local execution node, and a Hello World! playbook is also furnished within this repository.

More information can be found here:

• Docker
  • Dockerfile
  • Docker Compose
• Ansible
  • Ansible inventory
  • Ansible playbooks

Build the image

To build the image, run the following command:

docker build -t local/ansible .

The build will download ubuntu:22.04 and install the required packages to run Ansible. It will also create the user ansible and all the directories to mount local playbooks and inventory. Finally, it adds the following aliases to make playbook run easily:

• ansible-playbook='ansible-playbook -i /home/ansible/inventory.yml' to use the local inventory as the default one
• ap='ansible-playbook to quickly run playbooks

The image tag is local/ansible.

Run the container

To run the container, simply use the provided docker-composer configuration file:

docker-compose up -d ansible

Connect to the container

To connect to the container, run the following command:

docker-compose exec ansible bash

Once run, you will be logged as ansible user in the /home/ansible directory.

Run Ansible playbooks

With the legacy command:

cd playbooks
ansible-playbook hello-world.yml

As you notice, there is no need to provide the inventory location as an argument, as the ansible-playbook is an alias of the full command ansible-playbook -i /home/ansible/inventory/inventory.yml

With the short alias:

cd playbooks
ap hello-world.yml

Once run you might have an output like this:

PLAY [Hello World] ***************************************************************************************************

TASK [Gathering Facts] ***********************************************************************************************
ok: [localhost]

TASK [Log Hello World!] **********************************************************************************************
ok: [localhost] => {
    "msg": "Hello World!"
}

PLAY RECAP ***********************************************************************************************************
localhost                  : ok=2    changed=0    unreachable=0    failed=0    skipped=0    rescued=0    ignored=0