Developing and Testing Ansible Roles with Molecule and Podman – Part 2

Molecule is a complete testing framework that helps you develop and test Ansible roles, which allows you to focus on role content instead of focusing on managing testing infrastructure. In the first part of this series, we’ve successfully installed, configured and used Molecule to set up new testing instances.

Now that the instances are running, let’s start developing the new role and apply Molecule to ensure it runs according to the specifications.

This basic role deploys a web application supported by the Apache web server. It must support Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8 and Ubuntu 20.04.

Developing the Ansible Role with Molecule

Molecule helps in the development stage by allowing you to “converge” the instances with the role content. You can test each step without worrying about managing the instances and test environment. It provides quick feedback, allowing you to focus on the role content, ensuring it works in all platforms.

In the first part of this series, we initialized a new role “mywebapp”. If you’re not there yet, switch to the role directory “mywebapp” and add the first task, installing the Apache package “httpd” using the “package” Ansible module. Edit the file “tasks/main.yaml” and include Continue reading

Developing and Testing Ansible Roles with Molecule and Podman – Part 1

One of the beauties of the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is that the language to describe automation is readable not only by a few dedicated experts, but by almost anyone across the IT ecosystem. That means all IT professionals can take part in the automation, enabling cross team collaboration and really drive automation as a culture inside an organization. With so many people contributing to the automation, it is crucial to test the automation content in-depth. So when you’re developing new Ansible Content like playbooks, roles and collections, it’s a good idea to test the content in a test environment before using it to automate production infrastructure. Testing ensures the automation works as designed and avoids unpleasant surprises down the road. 

Testing automation content is often a challenge, since it requires the deployment of specific testing infrastructure as well as setting up the testing conditions to ensure the tests are relevant. Molecule is a complete testing framework that helps you develop and test Ansible roles, which allows you to focus on the content instead of focusing on managing testing infrastructure.

According to its official documentation, Molecule is a project:

 “designed to aid in the development and testing Continue reading