ansible in Docker

Dockerfile and instructions for running ansible in docker.

Mainly used on Windows, to work around ansible not working natively on it.

Getting started

SSH private key

Copy your private SSH key to this repository, so that it can be copied to the image during docker build.

Alternatively, if you won't be using an SSH key when communicating via ansible, just generate an empty key here, with the following command. (It's needed so that docker build doesn't fail)

echo "" > id_rsa

id_rsa is already in .gitignore

Docker image build

After copying the key, run the following to build the docker image.

docker build -t ansible .

Or alternatively, you can specify which ansible version you want during build.

docker build --build-arg ANSIBLE_VERSION=2.7.0 -t ansible .

The resulting image will be used by all the other scripts, described in the Usage section.

Usage

exec

The exec directory contains the executable wrapper script(-s), that let you use your newly created image in a way, similar to how you would use ansible <arg> commands if you had ansible installed locally.

Just add this directory to your PATH, and start using them.

The following is an explanation of how these scripts work.

ansible-playbook <args> | ansible-galaxy <args>

Execute ansible-playbook or ansible-galaxy commands in your current working directory.

cd /path/to/repo/with/ansible/playbooks
ansible-playbook --version
ansible-playbook -u user1 site.yml
ansible-galaxy install -r requirements.yml
# etc

In a nutshell, these scripts just mount the current directory to the ansible container and run the ansible-playbook <args> or ansible-galaxy <args> commands against it.

FAQ

Why not just install ansible locally?

The main reason is Windows. ansible currently doesn't have Windows support, but this solution can be run on any system as long is it has docker, including Windows.

Known issues

• As one might expect, this implementation of ansible is more limited than the standard way of installing on a native linux machine. It has the following known limitation:
  • It assumes that ansible.cfg will only exist in the current working directory
  • The scripts in exec dir run the ansible container with the --rm option. Meaning that you'll need to save your roles in the current work dir, otherwise they will be saved inside the container and lost after the container is removed. ansible.cfg line that can be used for this purpose: roles_path = ./roles