Ansible-test is a tool for testing your automation on local docker images. You can think of this as a slim version of Chef's test-kitchen.

$ cd /my/ansible/repository
$ ansible-test my_ansible_role

The above command will drop a Dockerfile at the root of your ansible repo and initialize a docker image with ansible installed. It will then run the ansible role "my_ansible_role".

Note that ansible-test also accepts arbitrary arguments. These arguments will be passed on to the ansible-playbook command while running tests:

ansible-test my_ansible_role --ask-vault-pass

Ansible test also accepts an image argument to specify the base docker image:

ansible-test my_ansible_role --image ubuntu:latest

See the example ansible flask project, which tests with ansible-test out-of-the-box

To install ansible-test:

$ pip install ansible-test

ansible-test requires that you have docker installed locally. If you are using Mac OSX, I recommend you use boot2docker.

NOTE: Given docker's inflexibility with Dockerfiles, ansible-test will overwrite the Dockerfile in the current working directory from which you run ansible-test. This is currently the simplest way to integrate docker as a testing tool.