Introduction

Setting up an Ansible environment

We’ll start by laying down the foundations for you to build on as the course progresses.

To answer; “How do I set up an Ansible environment?”; we will explore the following three chapters:

• Ansible Development with Containers
• Connect to the Cloud
• Deploy an Ansible Environment

Once connected to the cloud, we will dive into some basic Ansible ad-hoc commands and playbooks before deploying an Ansible environment.

Let’s get started with the first chapter.

Ansible environment with containers

Objective
Run Ansible within a Docker Container

Steps

1. Install Docker.
2. Create a Dockerfile.
3. Build a Docker Image.
4. Run a Docker Container.
5. Push a Docker Image to DockerHub.

We will start by walking you through building an Ansible environment in the docker container. Using a container environment provides various benefits such as:

• Provides a consistent development experience for you and your team.
• Separates the Ansible environment from the infrastructure it aims to manage.
• Reduces management overhead (less infrastructure to manage).
• Provides an immutable Ansible environment.

For this purpose, we will be working with Docker.

Getting started with Docker

We have already talked about the importance of containers above. Docker is a container management tool. You can easily build, run, and deploy containers using Docker.

Our first objective of this chapter is to install Docker. We have provided you with a pre-configured environment with Docker already installed, so you don’t have to go through the hassle of installing it yourself.

You can play with the pre-configured terminal below.

Run the following command to see if Docker is installed or not.

docker --version

It will display the current version of Docker installed.