Working with the Ansible development environment

The starting point for the development of new Ansible roles is the directory /vagrant/provisioning on the Ansible management node, called master. This directory is shared between the virtual host system and the virtual guest system, meaning that if the master node is reseted or deleted, Ansible roles and playbooks will be preserved.

All actions described in this documentation will be performed as user vagrant unless otherwise specified, which is the default user in a Vagrant environment.

Before you start with your work, ensure you have saved the environment. Then you can go back if something goes wrong, see section "Vagrant provider specific tasks" for save and restore the state of a virtual machine.

Environment preparation

Logon to the mangement node

Change to the project directory, start the virtual machines with vagrangt if they are not already started, and log in to the ansible management node via ssh.

cd <path>/ansible-development
vagrant up && vagrant ssh

Check if the environment is ready

Control if the ansible environment is working with:

ansible all -m ping

All clients that were up and running and dynamicaly added to the inventory file /vagrant/provisioning/vagrant.ini should positiv respond to this command.

Manualy configured inventory file

If you use a manualy configured inventory file instead of the dynamicaly configured inventory file (which is the default) then you have to specify your Ansible clients in /vagrant/provisioning/inventory.ini on your own.

Create a new Ansible role

If you want to create a new Ansible role put the new role in directory /vagrant/provisioning/roles on the Ansible management node. Remember the folder /vagrant is a shared folder between the virtual host and the virtual guest system.

cd /vagrant/provisioning/roles
ansible-galaxy init example-role

Then edit the main task of the role example-role.

vi example-role/tasks/main.yml

Insert your tasks, for example:

# tasks file for example-role

- name: Show all IPv4 addresses
    var: ansible_all_ipv4_addresses

Now create a playbook for the new role:

cd /vagrant/provisioning
vi example-playbook.yml

Put the new role in the playbook.

# file: example-playbook.yml

- hosts: all
    - { role: example-role }

Test the new Ansible role

After that you can test the new role/playbook with:

./test-playbook example-playbook.yml

The shell script test-playbook will execute the following four steps:

  1. Testing the role’s syntax.
  2. Perform a dry run.
  3. Run the role/playbook.
  4. Run the role/playbook again, checking to make sure it's idempotent.

Thanks to Jeff Geerling for his articles to Ansible test strategies. He is also the author of Ansible for DevOps, a great book about Ansible.

Use roles with Ansible Vault feature

If you want to use the Ansible Vault feature with your roles you have to create an Ansible Vault password file /vagrant/provisioning/.ansible_vault and add the following line in vagrant's ~/.bashrc file:

export ANSIBLE_VAULT_PASSWORD_FILE=/vagrant/provisioning/.ansible_vault

You can activate the new environment variable with:

. ~/.bashrc


If you want to use Ansible's Vault feature while provisioning the whole environment with vagrant provision or vagrant up --provision using Vagrant's local Ansible provsionier, then you should also uncomment the following line in the Vagrantfile:

# ansible.vault_password_file = "provisioning/.ansible_vault"