Ansible Execution Environment (EE) Builder

This repository contains Ansible automation to build custom Execution Environments (EEs) for use with Ansible Automation Platform (or ansible-navigator). It uses ansible-builder to assemble the EEs based on definition files and pushes them to a container registry.

Table of Contents

• Prerequisites
• Configuration
  • Ansible Vault
• Usage
  • Building an Execution Environment
• Available Execution Environments
• How It Works
• License

Prerequisites

Before you begin, ensure you have the following tools installed on your system:

• ansible-core
• ansible-builder
• podman (or another compatible container engine)
• ansible-vault

You will also need one or more Ansible collections:

ansible-galaxy collection install -r collections/requirements.yml

Configuration

Ansible Vault

This project uses Ansible Vault to manage sensitive registry credentials.

1. Create the Vault File: Create a file named .vault.yml in the root of the repository with the following content:

   ---
   # Credentials for the source registry (e.g., registry.redhat.io)
   registry_name: "registry.redhat.io"
   registry_user: "" # Your Red Hat username/service account
   registry_pass: "" # Your Red Hat password/service account token
   registry_token: "" # Your Red Hat Offline Token for Ansible Galaxy
   
   # Credentials for the destination registry (e.g., quay.io)
   dest_registry_name: "quay.io"
   dest_registry_user: "" # Your destination registry username
   dest_registry_pass: "" # Your destination registry password/token

2. Create a Vault Password File: The ansible.cfg in this repository is configured to use a vault password file named .vault_pass.txt. Create this file and add your vault password to it.

   echo "your_super_secret_vault_password" > .vault_pass.txt

3. Encrypt the Vault File: Encrypt the .vault.yml file using ansible-vault.

   ansible-vault encrypt .vault.yml --vault-password-file .vault_pass.txt

Usage

Building an Execution Environment

To build an EE, run the build_ee.yml playbook and specify which EE definition file you want to use with the ee_vars_file extra variable.

Example:

To build the ee-casc-rhel9 environment for Ansible Automation Platform 2.6, run the following command:

ansible-playbook build_ee.yml --extra-vars "ee_vars_file=vars/ansible-automation-platform-26/ee-casc-rhel9.yml"

The playbook will build the container image and push it to the destination registry specified in your .vault.yml file (e.g., quay.io/lshirley/ansible-automation-platform-26/ee-casc-rhel9).

Available Execution Environments

The definitions for the execution environments are located in the vars/ directory.

Name	Purpose	Notes	Ansible Core	OS	Var File	Public Repo
ansible-automation-platform-24/ee-casc-rhel8-git	Config as Code for AAP 2.4	Collections pulled from Public Git Repos	2.16.x	RHEL 8	Link	Link
ansible-automation-platform-24/ee-casc-rhel8	Config as Code for AAP 2.4	Collections pulled from RH Console	2.16.x	RHEL 8	Link	Link
ansible-automation-platform-24/ee-casc-rhel9-git	Config as Code for AAP 2.4	Collections pulled from Public Git Repos	2.16.x	RHEL 9	Link	Link
ansible-automation-platform-24/ee-casc-rhel9	Config as Code for AAP 2.4	Collections pulled from RH Console	2.16.x	RHEL 9	Link	Link
ansible-automation-platform-25/ee-casc-rhel8-git	Config as Code for AAP 2.5	Collections pulled from Public Git Repos	2.16.x	RHEL 8	Link	Link
ansible-automation-platform-25/ee-casc-rhel8	Config as Code for AAP 2.5	Collections pulled from RH Console	2.16.x	RHEL 8	Link	Link
ansible-automation-platform-25/ee-casc-rhel9-git	Config as Code for AAP 2.5	Collections pulled from Public Git Repos	2.16.x	RHEL 9	Link	Link
ansible-automation-platform-25/ee-casc-rhel9	Config as Code for AAP 2.5	Collections pulled from RH Console	2.16.x	RHEL 9	Link	Link
ansible-automation-platform-26/ee-casc-rhel9-git	Config as Code for AAP 2.6	Collections pulled from Public Git Repos	2.16.x	RHEL 9	Link	Link
ansible-automation-platform-26/ee-casc-rhel9	Config as Code for AAP 2.6	Collections pulled from RH Console	2.16.x	RHEL 9	Link	Link
ee-proxmox-rhel9	Dynamic Proxmox Inventory		2.17.x	RHEL 9	Link	Link
ee-unifi-rhel9	Dynamic UniFi Inventory		2.17.x	RHEL 9	Link	Link
ee-xorriso-rhel9	Building ISO's		2.15.x	RHEL 9	Link	Link

How It Works

1. The build_ee.yml playbook is the main entry point.
2. It includes the variable file specified by ee_vars_file to get the specific EE definition.
3. It calls the build_ee role.
4. The role creates a _build directory and templates out the necessary files for ansible-builder, including execution-environment.yml, requirements.txt, etc.
5. It runs the ansible-builder build command to create the container image.
6. Finally, it tags the new image with latest and a timestamp, and pushes both tags to the destination registry.

Give credit where credit is due

• My build_ee role is a tweaked version I got from Alex Dworjan's repo here. Please be sure to give him a shout out!

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.