A Docker based Ansible control machine useful for running playbooks with a consistent environment. Other similar images look to build the software items into a Docker image using Ansible, or automate the creation of a control machine, but what I wanted is to be able to run Ansible playbooks consistently using an immutable environment.

With Ansible, a typical use case is to have your CI server (Jenkins, Bamboo, etc...) orchestrate a set of playbooks to perform tasks (provision cloud resources, install packages, configure applications, etc...). The CI environments evolve over time often introducing dependencies which conflict with those required to run the desired version of Ansible and supporting modules which is a pain to manage IMO. This Docker image allows you to run a fixed version of Ansible, with dependencies for some of the popular modules (ec2, route53, archive, yum, apt, etc...) in an environment which will not change as the Ansible control machine's environment becomes immutable.

Having the Ansible control machine's environment packaged up in a Docker container, the ability to provision resources using it dynamically becomes possible using a wide variety of configurations. For example, you can run this control machine via:

• Jenkins slaves configured with nothing more than Docker
• As tasks on Amazon Elastic Compute Service (ECS)
• As short lived pods on Kubernetes
• On your laptop without pre-installing Ansible

Basically, this control machine can be run anywhere you can run a Docker container.

docker build --tag ansiblecm:6.2.0 .

Docker images are available on Docker Hub.

By default, this control machine will assume the execution of an Ansible playbook. To specify which playbook to run, simply map the playbook into the container like so:

docker run -it --rm -v <absolute path to playbook>:/tmp/playbook:Z jmal98/ansiblecm:6.2.0 <playbook arguments>

For example, the following will run the playbook in the current directory.

docker run -it --rm -v $PWD:/tmp/playbook:Z jmal98/ansiblecm:6.2.0 site.yml -i inventory/hosts

This control machine is also useful for running Ansible "one liners" which do not require a playbook. The example below runs the setup module on the web machines as specified in the inventory file.

docker run -it --rm --entrypoint ansible jmal98/ansiblecm:6.2.0 web -m setup -i inventory

A demo of how to use this control machine locally is provided. For details on the setup and execution of the demo, see DEMO.

The versions of this image will closely track to the versions of Ansible. The versions of module dependencies will be fixed to compatible versions.

Contributions are welcome.

Apache License 2.0, see LICENSE.