The goal here is to easily set up an environment to test out ansible commands, playbooks or roles. The various hosts are setup as Docker containers running Debian Jessie, SSH and Python.

You need to have Docker, Docker-compose and Python installed. You may choose to have Ansible installed globally, or you can use a virtual environment. You also need to have the port 2222 and a few more after that open for local connections.

git clone https://github.com/kbairak/ansible-playground
cd ansible-playground
make

make makes sure that the containers will use your public key to authenticate SSH connections and also builds the image for the containers (based on krlmlr/debian-ssh).

If you want to install Ansible in a virtual environment:

mkvirtualenv ansible
pip install ansible

./bin/add_host webserver

This command edits your docker-compose.yml, ssh.config and inventory files so that you can target a host named 'webserver' in your ansible commands and playbooks. Feel free to add as many hosts as you like. Also feel free to check the modified files in order to understand what went on there.

make up  # Runs `docker-compose up -d`
ansible webserver -m ping

If everything went smoothly, you should see this:

webserver | SUCCESS => {
    "changed": false,
    "ping": "pong"
}

• As long as you don't remove anything from your docker-compose.yml file, you should be able to remove all your containers with:

  make down  # Runs `docker-compose down`

• If you want to stop the containers so that you don't lose any changes you might have made to them, run

  make stop  # Runs `docker-compose stop`

  instead. You can restart them later with:

  make restart  # Runs `docker-compose restart`

• If you remove some services from docker-compose.yml while their respective containers are running, then docker-compose won't be able to find them. In this case, look them up with:

  docker ps -a
  
  CONTAINER ID        IMAGE               COMMAND                  CREATED             STATUS                      PORTS                              NAMES
  c9fcc0e9a172        debian-ssh-python   "/run.sh"                4 minutes ago       Up 4 minutes                0.0.0.0:2222->22/tcp               ansibleplayground_webserver_1

  The names added by docker-compose should make it easy to identify and stop/remove them.

  docker stop ansibleplayground_webserver_1
  docker rm -f ansibleplayground_webserver_1