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Ansible’s vmware.vmware_rest collection, Execution Environment and ansible-navigator

Written by

Goneri

in

Ansible-Navigator is a new terminal base UI for Ansible. It aims to provide an alternative to the different ansible commands that you probably already familiar with. To learn more about Ansible-Navigator, a couple of recent blog posts on Ansible Blog cover this new tool. The Execution Environment, or just EE, is also a rather recent concept. With a EE Ansible and all its dependencies are shipped as a single container. You don’t need anymore to care about the Python version, the virtualenv, the collections and Python dependency.

Ansible-Navigator provides an interface that is inspired by ansible-playbook. In this example we will see how we can use the CLI to run a playbook. My pass some credentials through environment variables, we will also see how to expose them properly.

The first thing is to prepare a ansible-navigator.yml file in your project directory.

---
ansible-navigator:
   execution-environment:
     container-engine: podman
     enabled: True
     image: myregister/ansible-automation-platform-21-ee-supported-rhel8:2.1.0
     pull-policy: never
     environment-variables:
        pass:
          - VMWARE_VALIDATE_CERTS
          - VMWARE_HOST
          - VMWARE_PASSWORD
          - VMWARE_USER
          - ESXI1_PASSWORD
          - ESXI1_HOSTNAME
          - ESXI1_USERNAME

The image key point on the container, I use a Fedora and Podman is the default for container. I ensure Navigator use the right engine with the container-engine: podman configuration. I use the environment-variables section to list all the variables that I want to expose in my container. If you want to read about all the other configuration options, just read the documentation at https://ansible-navigator.readthedocs.io/en/latest/.

If your playbook depends on some roles, for instance within a roles directory, it’s important to call ansible-navigator from the root directory of your project. Otherwise, the roles won’t be reachable from within the container. If your roles are maintained at a different location, you can still expose their directories with the volume-mounts option. This is in my opinion slightly less elegant.

[goneri@t580 targets]$ ls -lh
total 416K
-rw-r--r--. 1 goneri goneri  469 Oct 19 15:09 ansible-navigator.yml
drwxrwxr-x. 2 goneri goneri    6 Oct 19 15:39 playbooks
drwxrwxr-x. 2 goneri goneri    6 Oct 19 15:39 roles

Now, I can just run my playbook with: ansible-navigator run --mode stdout playbooks/vcenter_vm_scenario1

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