Using Runner with Execution Environmnets¶
Execution Environments are meant to be a consistent, reproducible, portable, and sharable method to run Ansible Automation jobs in the exact same way on your laptop as they are executed in `Ansible AWX <https://github.com/ansible/awx/`_. This aids in the development of automation jobs and Ansible Content that is meant to be run in Ansible AWX, Ansible Tower, or via Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform in a predictable way.
More specifically, the term Execution Environments within the context of Ansible Runner refers to the container runtime execution of Ansible via Ansible Runner within an OCI Compliant Container Runtime using an OCI Compliant Container Image that appropriately bundles Ansible Base, Ansible Collection Content, and the runtime dependencies required to support these contents. The base image is the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Universal Base Image and the build tooling provided by Ansible Builder aids in the creation of these images.
All aspects of running Ansible Runner in standalone mode (see: Using Runner as a standalone command line tool) are true here with the exception that the process isolation is inherently a container runtime (podman by default).
Emulating the Ansible CLI¶
As previously mentioned, a primary goal of adding the Execution Environment CLI
interface is to aid in the creation of Ansible Automation jobs and content. The
approach here is to make it as similar as possible to the way Ansible users
are accustomed to using Ansible today. There are two subcommands, adhoc
and
playbook
that have been added to accommodate this. The adhoc
subcommand
to ansible-runner
is synonymous with ansible
and the playbook
subcommand to ansible-runner
is synonymous with ansible-playbook
.
Examples are below.
Running Ansible adhoc¶
An example invocation using the ping
module and localhost
as target:
$ ansible-runner adhoc localhost -m ping
Something to note here is that implicit localhost
in this context is a containerized instantiation of an Ansible Execution Environment and as such you will not get Ansible Facts about your system if using the setup
module.
Running Ansible ansible-playbook¶
An example invocation using the demo.yml
playbook and inventory.ini
inventory file:
$ ansible-runner playbook demo.yml -i inventory.ini
Something to note here is that implicit localhost
in this context is a containerized instantiation of an Ansible Execution Environment and as such you will not get Ansible Facts about your system if using gather_facts: true
and targeting localhost
in your playbook without explicit host definition in your inventory.
Notes and Considerations¶
There are some differences between using Ansible Runner and running Ansible directly from the command line that have to do with configuration, content locality, and secret data.
Secrets¶
Typically with Ansible you are able to provide secret data via a series of mechanisms, many of which are pluggable and configurable. When using Ansible Runner, however, certain considerations need to be made; these are analogous to how Ansible AWX and Tower manage this information.
See Runner Input Directory Hierarchy for more information
Container Names¶
Like all ansible-runner jobs, each job has an identifier associated with it
which is also the name of the artifacts subfolder where results are saved to.
When a container for job isolation is launched, it will be given a name
of ansible_runner_<job identifier>
. Some characters from the job
identifier may be replaced with underscores for compatibility with
names that Podman and Docker allow.
This name is used internally if a command needs to be ran against the container at a later time (e.g., to stop the container when the job is canceled).
~/.ssh/ symlinks¶
In order to make the adhoc
and playbook
container execution of Ansible
easier, Ansible Runner will automatically bind mount your local ssh agent
UNIX-domain socket (SSH_AUTH_SOCK
) into the container runtime. However, this
does not work if files in your ~/.ssh/
directory happen to be symlinked to
another directory that is also not mounted into the container runtime. Ansible
Runner adhoc
and playbook
subcommands provide the --container-volume-mount
option to address this, among other things.
Here is an example of an ssh config file that is a symlink:
$ $ ls -l ~/.ssh/config
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 myuser myuser 34 Jul 15 19:27 /home/myuser/.ssh/config -> /home/myuser/dotfiles/ssh_config
$ ansible-runner playbook \
--container-volume-mount /home/myuser/dotfiles/:/home/myuser/dotfiles/ \
my_playbook.yml -i my_inventory.ini