(DEPRECATED) Multi-Platform Ansible Role and Playbook Test VMs

Deprecation Notice: I no longer maintain this repository. Please see my book, Ansible for DevOps, for more suggestions for local development and testing of Ansible roles and playbooks.

I maintain hundreds of roles on Ansible Galaxy, and dozens more locally. Since I run both CentOS (a RedHat derivative) and Ubuntu/Debian-based servers, I like to have a reliable platform to test my roles and playbooks everywhere with minimal effort.

On GitHub, I generally use Travis CI to run a minimal set of tests against the Travis CI environment (currently Ubuntu 12.04). I wrote about this setup on the Server Check.in Blog: Testing Ansible Roles with Travis CI on GitHub. It's impossible to bootstrap extra test VMs inside the Travis environment due to Travis' use of OpenVZ. Thus, to run Ansible playbooks against CentOS and other versions of Ubuntu, I have to rely on a local configuration.

For this, I use Vagrant and some VirtualBox boxes that I build to follow the latest releases of the OSes I support. Currently, you can find the boxes I use on Atlas (they are hosted at files.midwesternmac.com), and this project runs a playbook against the following OSes:

• Ubuntu 12.04.x (192.168.3.4)
• Ubuntu 14.04.x (192.168.3.3)
• Ubuntu 16.04.x (192.168.3.2)
• CentOS 6.x (192.168.3.6)
• CentOS 7.x (192.168.3.5)

The project is extremely simple, and simply requires Vagrant, VirtualBox, and Ansible to be installed on your host machine.

Testing a Role

To test a role, the role must be installed on your host machine (you can install galaxy roles via $ ansible-galaxy install [rolename], but this project is more focused on testing roles you'd be working on locally). Just add the role to playbook.yml and run vagrant up.

It should take a few minutes to download each of the base boxes the first time, but after that, it takes about a minute to boot each VM, then run the playbook with your role(s).

After testing a role, you can destroy the four VMs with vagrant destroy -f. You can also just build one particular VM with vagrant up ubuntu1204 (as an example), or re-run the ansible playbook with vagrant provision ubuntu1204.

License

MIT

Author Information

Created in 2014 by Jeff Geerling, author of Ansible for DevOps.