ansible-role + ansible-test-role

ansible-role: Run an ansible role in an isolated disposable environment (a temporary vagrant virtual machine)

ansible-test-role: Test a single ansible role in a temporary virtual machine to verify it's correctness.

Default vagrant image is Debian 8 64 bit (debian/jessie64).

What is it doing exactly?

1. Reuse or prepare a temporary vagrant machine and start it
2. Create a temporary ansible inventory based on the vagrant machine data
3. Run ansible-playbook with a temporary playbook only containing the role passed to the script as a parameter
4. Optional: Tear down the vagrant machine and remove all temporary files

Requirements

• ansible
• vagrant
• any compatible virtual machine environment, e.g.
  • virtualbox
  • libvirt

Setup

sudo curl -Lo "/usr/local/bin/ansible-role" "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thomas-mc-work/ansible-test-role/master/ansible-role.sh"
sudo curl -Lo "/usr/local/bin/ansible-test-role" "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thomas-mc-work/ansible-test-role/master/ansible-test-role.sh"
sudo chmod +x "/usr/local/bin/ansible-role" "/usr/local/bin/ansible-test-role"

The target folder /usr/local/bin could also be replaced by your personal bin folder ($HOME/bin).

Usage

ansible-role:

ansible-role <role-path> [ansible-playbook options]

ansible-test-role:

ansible-test-role <role-path> [ansible-playbook options]

ansible-playbook options: These can be valid ansible-playbook options which wil be passed through.

Allowed environment variables

You can define several environment variables which are used by vagrant or ansible like these:

• VAGRANT_DEFAULT_PROVIDER: The latest version of vagrant (2.0 as of 2017-10-27) isn't able to work with virtualbox version ≥ 5.2 – so you can easily switch to e.g. libvirt herewith

Forbidden environment variables

These are defined in the script and thus overridden:

• ANSIBLE_ROLES_PATH
• ANSIBLE_INVENTORY
• VAGRANT_CWD

Alternatives

• Molecule: It seems to be a very more profound solution. One big drawback is the big footprint of configuration files that it creates in your project (and thus in your SCM).
• RoleSpec: focuses on Travis-CI integration
• ansible-test: (didn't work on my machine: Xubuntu 16.04.3)

Thanks to

… Konstantin Suvorov aka @berlic for this inspiration