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Hands-on Lab·Ansible

Ansible Development Containers with ansible-navigator

EX294 expects you to run playbooks from a development container. The measurement worth having is the comparison: the container carries a **newer** ansible-core than the control node and **far fewer** collections, which is the whole argument for execution environments and looks like a fault until you see why.

Bonus: Beyond the Blueprint Guide 45 of 45 Advanced

Written against the versions above. `community-ansible-dev-tools` is the development image - ansible-core plus ansible-lint, molecule and ansible-builder, at 1.39 GB. `community-ee-minimal` is the runtime image at 445 MB. Develop in the first, ship with something closer to the second.

The control node runs the container; the playbook inside it still reaches ANS-A01 over SSH.
Server NameIP AddressOSRolesCPURAMHDD
ANS-CTL01192.168.0.36Ubuntu 26.04 LTSAnsible Control Node2 Core3 GB50 GB
ANS-A01192.168.0.37Ubuntu 26.04 LTSManaged Node (group: web)2 Core3 GB50 GB
ANS-B01192.168.0.38Ubuntu 26.04 LTSManaged Node (group: db)2 Core3 GB50 GB

Before you start

  1. The configuration this guide assumes

  2. Two images, two jobs

  3. The control node does not have the toolchain

  4. The container does, and it is not the same Ansible

  5. Your project is already inside it

  6. Lint the playbook you actually have

  7. Run the playbook in the same container

  8. What it does not inherit

Official sources

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