Python Ansible Runner

Posted on 05-10-2021 by admin

Run Ansible Playbook From Python
Python Ansible Runners
Ansible Python Api Example

Minimal code to run an Ansible Playbook from within python and get stats back on success or fail - minimalansibleplaybook.py. Apr 06, 2015 # Get pip sudo apt-get install -y python-pip # Get virtualenv and create one sudo pip install virtualenv cd /path/to/runner/script virtualenv./.env source./env/bin/activate # Install Ansible into the virtualenv pip install ansible. Then, with the environment active, we call upon Ansible from our Python scripts.

That is it your hello world module finished. Pass variables in and out of a Python Module. I was working on an upgrade script and I needed to bump the Semantic Versioning i.e. Bumping the minor version of 1.1.1, Ansible handles this poorly as it is not a float or a int.

Ansible Runner is a tool and python library that helps when interfacing with Ansible directly or as part of another systemwhether that be through a container image interface, as a standalone tool, or as a Python module that can be imported. The goalis to provide a stable and consistent interface abstraction to Ansible. This allows Ansible to be embedded into other systems that don’twant to manage the complexities of the interface on their own (such as CI/CD platforms, Jenkins, or other automated tooling).

Ansible Runner represents the modularization of the part of Ansible Tower/AWX that is responsiblefor running ansible and ansible-playbook tasks and gathers the output from it. It does this by presenting a common interface that doesn’tchange, even as Ansible itself grows and evolves.

Using Runner as a Python Module Interface to Ansible. Ansible Runner is intended to provide a directly importable and usable API for interfacing with Ansible itself and exposes a few helper interfaces. The modules center around the Runner object. The helper methods will either return an instance of this object which provides an interface to.
Hello, I would like to use ansiblerunner instead of the python api to interface with ansible for a very specific task. But I want to script to be self contained so i hardcode the inventory and the playbook directly on the script. The code below is a simplified version. Usually the hosts are passed as arguments.

Part of what makes this tooling useful is that it can gather its inputs in a flexible way (See Introduction to Ansible Runner:). It also has a system for storing theoutput (stdout) and artifacts (host-level event data, fact data, etc) of the playbook run.

There are 3 primary ways of interacting with Runner

A standalone command line tool (ansible-runner) that can be started in the foreground or run in the background asynchronously
A reference container image that can be used as a base for your own images and will work as a standalone container or running inOpenshift or Kubernetes
A python module - library interface

Ansible Runner can also be configured to send status and event data to other systems using a plugin interface, see Sending Runner Status and Events to External Systems.

Examples of this could include:

Sending status to Ansible Tower/AWX
Sending events to an external logging service

Contents:

Introduction to Ansible Runner
Installing Ansible Runner
Sending Runner Status and Events to External Systems
Using Runner as a standalone command line tool
Using Runner as a Python Module Interface to Ansible
Using Runner with Execution Environmnets
Using Runner as a container interface to Ansible
Remote job execution

Ansible 2.5 and above work with Python 3. Previous to 2.5, using Python 3 wasconsidered a tech preview. This topic discusses how to set up your controller and managed machinesto use Python 3.

Note

On the controller we support Python 3.5 or greater and Python 2.7 or greater. Module-side, we support Python 3.5 or greater and Python 2.6 or greater.

On the controller side

Run Ansible Playbook From Python

The easiest way to run /usr/bin/ansible under Python 3 is to install it with the Python3version of pip. This will make the default /usr/bin/ansible run with Python3:

If you are running Ansible Running the devel branch from a clone and want to use Python 3 with your source checkout, run yourcommand via python3. For example:

Note

Individual Linux distribution packages may be packaged for Python2 or Python3. When running fromdistro packages you’ll only be able to use Ansible with the Python version for which it wasinstalled. Sometimes distros will provide a means of installing for several Python versions(via a separate package or via some commands that are run after install). You’ll need to checkwith your distro to see if that applies in your case.

Using Python 3 on the managed machines with commands and playbooks

Ansible will automatically detect and use Python 3 on many platforms that ship with it. To explicitly configure aPython 3 interpreter, set the ansible_python_interpreter inventory variable at a group or host level to thelocation of a Python 3 interpreter, such as /usr/bin/python3. The default interpreter path may also beset in ansible.cfg.

What to do if an incompatibility is found

We have spent several releases squashing bugs and adding new tests so that Ansible’s core featureset runs under both Python 2 and Python 3. However, bugs may still exist in edge cases and many ofthe modules shipped with Ansible are maintained by the community and not all of those may be portedyet.