Local Ansible Testing with Vagrant

Vagrant is a command-line wrapper around VirtualBox and allows setting up one or more virtual machines to test out Ansible playbooks locally.

The repo contains a Vagrantfile (created with the command vagrant init ubuntu/xenial64) that has been modified to work with Ansible.

Start Vagrant Machine

Start a Vagrant virtual machine using the Vagrantfile by running the following command in this directory:

vagrant up

This will start a Ubuntu Xenial (16.04) machine.

Provision Vagrant Machine (Setup Step)

Ansible can be used to provision the vagrant machine, which is basically a step that gets it ready for the "real" Ansible playbook.

(Specifically, the provision step installs /usr/bin/python, which is not included by default in newer versions of Ubuntu.)

Use the Ansible configuration file that is intended for use with Vagrant, vagrant.cfg, when running the vagrant provision command:

ANSIBLE_CONFIG="vagrant.cfg" vagrant provision

Set Vagrant Configuration File

Now get info about how to SSH into the vagrant machines and provide this information in the vagranthosts Ansible inventory file:

vagrant ssh-config

Add information about the location of the private key file, and any other details, into vagrant.cfg:

vagrant.cfg:

[defaults]
inventory = vagranthosts
remote_user = vagrant
private_key_file = ~/.vagrant.d/insecure_private_key
host_key_checking = False
log_path = ansible_vagrant.log
command_warnings=False
vault_password_file = .vault_secret

This example points to a vault secret contained in the file .vault_secret as seen in the last line.

See Ansible Vault for more info about vault secrets.