Using Runner with Execution Environments

Note

For an Execution Environments general technology overview and to learn how get started using it in a few easy steps, see the Getting started with Execution Environments guide.

Execution Environments are meant to be a consistent, reproducible, portable, and shareable method to run Ansible Automation jobs in the exact same way on your laptop as they are executed in Ansible AWX. This aids in the development of automation jobs and Ansible Content that is meant to be run in Ansible AWX, 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 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).

Using Execution Environments from Protected Registries

When a job is run that uses an execution environment container image from a private/protected registry, you will first need to authenticate to the registry.

If you are running the job manually via ansible-runner run, logging in on the command line via podman login first is a method of authentication. Alternatively, creating a container_auth_data dictionary with the keys host, username, and password and putting that in the job’s env/settings file is another way to ensure a successful pull of a protected execution environment container image. Note that this involves listing sensitive information in a file which will not automatically get cleaned up after the job run is complete.

When running a job remotely via AWX, Ansible Runner can pick up the authentication information from the Container Registry Credential that was provided by the user. The host, username, password, and verify_ssl inputs from the credential are passed into Ansible Runner via the container_auth_data dictionary as key word arguments into a json file which gets deleted at the end of the job run (even if the job was cancelled/interrupted), enabling the bypassing of sensitive information from any potentially persistent job-related files.

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 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 run 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. The Ansible Runner run subcommand provides 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 run \
    --container-volume-mount /home/myuser/dotfiles/:/home/myuser/dotfiles/ \
    --process-isolation --process-isolation-executable podman \
    /tmp/private --playbook my_playbook.yml -i my_inventory.ini