Using Vagrant to Help Learn Ansible
I’ve been spending some time with Ansible recently, and I have to say that it’s really growing on me. While Ansible doesn’t have a steep learning curve, there is still a learning curve—albeit a smaller/less steep curve—so I wanted to share here a “trick” that I found for using Vagrant to help with learning Ansible. (I say “trick” here because it isn’t that this is complicated or undocumented, but rather that it may not be immediately obvious how to combine these two.)
Note that this is not to be confused with using Ansible from within Vagrant as a provisioner; that’s something different (see the Vagrant docs for more information on that use case). What I’m talking about is having a setup where you can easily explore how Ansible works and iterate through your playbooks using a Vagrant-managed VM.
Here are the key components:
- You’ll need a Vagrant environment (you know, a working
Vagrantfileand any associated support files). - You’ll need Ansible installed on the system where you’ll be running Vagrant and the appropriate back-end virtualization platform (I tested this with VMware Fusion, but there’s nothing VMware-specific here).
- In the same directory as the
Vagrantfile, you’ll need an Continue reading
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