A simple yet flexible Ansible environment in Docker.

It expects your Ansible project at path /ansible. You can build your own container and copy it there or simply use a volume mount.

All Ansible commands will be run as non-root user ansible. They will be executed via virtualenv, so you are still able to install additional Python packages from your Playbooks or Ad-Hoc commands.

Adding your private key

Before any command is run, we copy whatever file is configured as DEFAULT_PRIVATE_KEY_FILE into the home directory of the ansible user and adjust its permissions.

We extract DEFAULT_PRIVATE_KEY_FILE from the effective configuration, so you can either configure it - for example - via environment variable ANSIBLE_PRIVATE_KEY_FILE or ansible.cfg.

After copying and chowning the file, we adjust the ANSIBLE_PRIVATE_KEY_FILE variable to point to the new file.

Eventually we start an ssh-agent and add the key to it. This makes working with password protected private keys much more convenient.

Adding a vault password file

Before any command is run, we copy whatever file is configured as DEFAULT_VAULT_PASSWORD_FILE into the home directory of the ansible user and adjust its permissions.

We extract DEFAULT_VAULT_PASSWORD_FILE from the effective configuration, so you can either configure it - for example - via environment variable ANSIBLE_VAULT_PASSWORD_FILE or ansible.cfg.

After copying and chowning the file, we adjust the ANSIBLE_VAULT_PASSWORD_FILE variable, and therefore the configuration, to point to the new file.

Configuring Ansible via Environment

Any given Ansible environment variable will be passed on to Ansible, just as it would be in a non-containerized environment. The only exceptions are ANSIBLE_VAULT_PASSWORD_FILE and ANSIBLE_PRIVATE_KEY_FILE for the reasons mentioned above.

Example

The following exmaple shows how to:

• Mount Ansible project a volume at path /ansible
• Adding an existing private key
• Adding a vault password file

docker run -it --rm
  -v "${YOUR_ANSIBLE_PROJECT}:/ansible:ro"
  -v "${HOME}/.ssh/id_rsa:/ansible-support/id_rsa:ro"
  -v "${YOUR_VAULT_KEY_FILE}:/ansible-support/vault_key:ro"
  -e "ANSIBLE_PRIVATE_KEY_FILE=/ansible-support/id_rsa"
  -e "ANSIBLE_VAULT_PASSWORD_FILE=/ansible-support/vault_key"
  hypoport/ansible:9.3.0 ansible-playbook --help