Installing and running collection from EE¶

Use the following information to create an Execution Environment (EE) container, run playbooks from the EE, and then create F5 ansible collections daily builds on an EE.

Creating EE (Execution Environment) container with f5_modules and f5_bigip collections¶

Before you start install the following packages:

For more information on ansible-builder head to https://ansible-builder.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html.

ansible-builder

pip install ansible-builder

For more information on ansible-builder head to https://ansible-navigator.readthedocs.io/en/latest/settings/.

ansible-navigator

pip3 install 'ansible-navigator[ansible-core]'

Create the following files:

execution-environment.yml

version: 3

dependencies:
  galaxy: requirements.yml
  python: requirements.txt

additional_build_steps:
  prepend_base:
    - RUN ln -s /usr/bin/microdnf /usr/bin/dnf

images:
  base_image:
    name: quay.io/ansible/creator-ee:latest

requirements.yml

---
collections:
  - name: ansible.netcommon
    version: ">=2.0.0"
  - name: f5networks.f5_modules
  - name: f5networks.f5_bigip

requirements.txt

ansible
ansible-runner
cryptography
objectpath
ordereddict
simplejson
paramiko
jinja2
netaddr
packaging

Once the previous files are created, run the following command from the same directory. If you placed the files somewhere else refer to ansible-builder documentation for appropriate command switches.

ansible-builder build --tag f5net_ee --container-runtime docker

Once the process is complete the image should appear when running docker image ls command:

└─▪ docker image ls
REPOSITORY                                  TAG       IMAGE ID       CREATED          SIZE
f5net_ee                                    latest    58cfdfa301f2   13 minutes ago   664MB
test_image                                  latest    c6b10c5283a3   2 days ago       662MB
quay.io/ansible/ansible-navigator-demo-ee   0.4.0     2542b362b47e   4 months ago     1.28GB

Running Playbooks from EE¶

To use the EE container to execute playbooks in your environment, it is recommended that an ansible-navigator config file is created to avoid typing long commands e.g.

ansible-navigator run to_run/f5_test.yaml --eei f5net_ee --pp never -i inv/hosts_bigips.yaml -m stdout --log-level debug --pas test_run.json

can be shortened to:

ansible-navigator run to_run/f5_test.yaml -i inv/hosts_bigips.yaml

with the following ansible-navigator.yml file:

ansible-navigator:
   ansible:
      config: /tmp/ansible.cfg
   ansible-runner:
     artifact-dir: /tmp
     rotate-artifacts-count: 10
     timeout: 300
   app: run
   execution-environment:
     container-engine: docker
     image: f5net_ee:latest
     pull-policy: never
  logging:
    level: debug
      append: True
      file: /tmp/log.txt
  mode: stdout
  playbook-artifact:
    enable: True
    save-as: /tmp/test_run.json

Please refer to ansible-navigator official documentation for further help: https://ansible-navigator.readthedocs.io/en/latest/settings/

One thing to note is that updating collections installed in containers, which were created locally, is not supported by ansible-builder, it seems that ansible-builder uses docker cache to create EE image so any attempts to rebuild the container will not cause new version of collection to be downloaded. To remedy this you can run docker command with –no-cache option against Dockerfile in the context directory which was created in the folder where ansible-builder build command was run:

docker build -f context/Dockerfile -t f5net_ee context --no-cache

Creating F5 Networks ansible collections daily builds on EE¶

The process of creating the EE container with daily builds remains the same as above, with the exception of requirements.yml file, which should be as follows:

---
collections:
  - name: ansible.netcommon
    version: ">=2.0.0"
  - name: f5networks.f5_modules
    source: https://github.com/F5Networks/f5-ansible.git#ansible_collections/f5networks/f5_modules
    type: git
    version: devel
  - name: f5networks.f5_bigip
    source: https://github.com/F5Networks/f5-ansible-bigip.git#ansible_collections/f5networks/f5_bigip
    type: git
    version: devel