Vagrant for ansible

A vagrant environment for running an Ubuntu 22.04 ready to test ansible commands/playbooks.

Since Vagrant provides easy to configure, reproducible, and portable work environments, this setup helps you create ansible playbooks in a safe environment using vagrant emulating real environments.

It is ready to run ansible just by starting the environment, the repository contains a preconfigured inventory ready to work with the target host. We use an Ubuntu 22.04 instance and the default vagrant user to log in.

How to use

Prerequisites

• Install Vagrant and Virtualbox.
• Have an ssh key located at: ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

Spin up the environment

Start vagrant target host:

$ vagrant up

Start writting ansible

Run ansible:

$ ansible -i inventory -m ping myhosts

Output:

192.168.56.10 | SUCCESS => {
    "ansible_facts": {
        "discovered_interpreter_python": "/usr/bin/python3"
    },
    "changed": false,
    "ping": "pong"
}

You will find a collection of playbooks in their directory ready to use them. The playbook target is defined as a variable. To match the current Vagrant host you need pass the target as follows:

ansible-playbook -i inventory  playbooks/addcronjob.yaml --extra-vars "target=myhosts" 

Output:

PLAY [myhosts] ******************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************

TASK [Gathering Facts] **********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
ok: [192.168.56.10]

TASK [cron] *********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
ok: [192.168.56.10]

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

More information about targeting hosts and groups: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/user_guide/intro_patterns.html

Debug

You can ssh into the vm with:

vagrant ssh

Or using a default ssh client:

ssh vagrant@192.168.56.10

Ansible provisioner

To run ansible adhoc commands the best option is use the previous approach that simulate a real environment. But you can also use the Ansible provisioner that uses a different approach, it will run on the provisioning phase of vagrant.