Developing Advanced Automation with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

When you use the ansible-navigator run command to run a playbook that requires Ansible Content Collections that are not in the automation execution environment, you must manually install the collections. Usually, the project provides a collections/requirements.yml file that you can process with the ansible-galaxy collection install -r collections/requirements.yml command to do this.

Automation controller does not require you to manually run this command. Instead, it automatically runs the following commands to install collections and roles when you run a playbook:

The collections/requirements.yml file that you provide in your Ansible project might point to collections available on Ansible automation hub or private automation hub.

For example, the following collections/requirements.yml file lists two collections. Ansible automation hub hosts the redhat.insights collection, and private automation hub at hub.example.com hosts the ansible.posix collection.

---
collections:
  - name: redhat.insights
    source: https://console.redhat.com/api/automation-hub/

  - name: ansible.posix
    source: https://hub.example.com/api/galaxy/content/rh-certified/

Ansible automation hub and private automation hubs require login credentials. You need to configure automation controller with a credential that provides the automation hub API token and URLs for Ansible automation hub and for any private automation hubs that your playbook uses to download collections.

To perform that configuration, follow these steps:

Automation controller automatically downloads the container images for its automation execution environments from a container registry. This could be a container registry built into automation hub, or one provided by a service such as Quay.

Many container registries require authentication for access. You need to configure automation controller with a credential to store this authentication information.

The following steps show how to create a credential for a container registry:

You can configure your automation execution environment images as follows:

When you set up your Ansible project in automation controller, you can specify a default automation execution environment for playbooks from that project to use.

Define the default execution environment for your project as follows:

A template specifies all the parameters that automation controller needs to run a playbook, including the project containing the playbook, the inventory to use, and machine credentials needed to access the managed nodes in its plays.

When you set up a job template to run a playbook, you can also select a specific execution environment to use when running the playbook. This overrides the default execution environment specified by the playbook's project.

Figure 9.7: Selecting an automation execution environment in a template

If you leave the Execution Environment field empty, then automation controller uses the default automation execution environment from the playbook's project.

After creating the template, click Launch to start a job (run the playbook). The first time you launch a job that uses a new automation execution environment, the job might take longer than later runs. Automation controller must download the automation execution environment's container image if it is not present.