[section_request] Testing Ansible playbooks and roles with Molecule + ansible-lint

[robsonpeixoto]

No description provided.

[geerlingguy]

Good question. The Molecule project has had a lot of uptake, and is definitely somewhat of a standard (even though I don't currently use it, ha!) for Ansible testing... I will consider it.

[2020 edit: now I use it everywhere, even for collections!]

[geerlingguy]

Yes. I will be working on it soon :)

I've been slowly moving some of my roles over to using Molecule instead of my home-grown solution, for example:

• https://travis-ci.org/geerlingguy/ansible-role-ansible
• https://travis-ci.org/geerlingguy/ansible-role-apache
• https://travis-ci.org/geerlingguy/ansible-role-nginx

[geerlingguy]

Sheesh, and a few of my roles (like Jenkins, Kibana, and Kubernetes) have soaked up an entire evening. It's slow progress, but I've learned a good deal about Molecule, and how some of my earlier tests were not quite up to my own standards!

I think I'll make a more informal blog post first (hopefully published around AnsibleFest week, as I get bored of practicing my slides...), then convert that into a good, tested section in the book, hopefully before end of year!

[geerlingguy]

Here's the promised blog post: Testing your Ansible roles with Molecule

[geerlingguy]

And here's a blog post on using Molecule to test Ansible Collections. I promise, I'll get some of this content into the book soon :)

[wkhayrattee]

Perfect @geerlingguy!
Look forward to updates. cheers

[geerlingguy]

And a good presentation on Molecule (the basics) from #cfgmgmt2020 https://cfp.cfgmgmtcamp.be/media/molecule_cfgmgmt2020.pdf

[geerlingguy]

People seem to keep requesting this quite frequently. I think I'll try to get the testing chapter rewritten post-haste!

[geerlingguy]

Working on this... note that I'm thinking of covering this (ansible-lint + molecule) in the 7th episode of Ansible 101.

[geerlingguy]

Also wanted to give a shout out to @loganmarchione for this reddit post mentioning How and why you should lint your Ansible playbooks.

[geerlingguy]

Also Ansible Linting with GitHub Actions.

[geerlingguy]

While working on a full rewrite of the new chapter 12 tonight (I bumped 12/13/14 to 13/14/15 and extracted testing into its own chapter), I ran into an issue with ansible-lint: ansible-lint fails if not running in a directory that is a .git repo.

So for ansible-lint, I'll have an example that explicitly lists a playbook to lint, rather than relying on auto-discovery like I do with most of my roles.

[geerlingguy]

Also opened up an issue in the Molecule repo: Fix getting-started docs - Dockerfile no longer shipped by default. I can't resist!

[geerlingguy]

Very close to finishing up the majority of this chapter, but I had to finish up prep work for tomorrow's live stream (see #257)—anyone following this issue should check out the live video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaXVZ60o8L8) or watch it on demand later... I'll cover a little more depth in the book, but the video should be a good preview of what's coming in the next book version!

[geerlingguy]

I have the example committed, and most of the chapter rewritten. I'll probably post a new version of the book next week. Moving the last portion of this work—using Molecule in a GitHub Actions workflow—into a separate issue.

[geerlingguy]

Split out the GitHub Actions for CI workflows into #264. Closing this issue.

For those interested, this topic is also being covered in my free / live / on-demand Ansible 101 series on YouTube:

• Ansible 101 - Episode 7 - Molecule Testing and Linting and Ansible Galaxy (May 6)
• Ansible 101 - Episode 8 - Playbook testing with Molecule and GitHub Actions CI (May 13)