(Locally) Testing ansible deployments

I’ve always felt my playbooks undertested. I know about a possible solution of spinning up new OpenStack instances with the ansible nova module, but felt it to be too complex as a good idea to implement. Now I’ve found a quicker way to test your playbooks by using Docker.

In principal, all my test does is:

1. create a docker container
2. create a copy of the current ansible playbook in a temporary directory and mount it as a volume
3. inside the docker container, run the playbook

This is obviously not perfect, since:

• running a playbook locally vs connecting via ssh can be a different beast to test
• can become resource intensive if you want to test different scenarios represented as docker images.

There is possibly more, but for myself in small it is a workable solution so far.

Find the code on github if you’d like to have a look. Improvements welcome!