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Test container image with eercheck

Anwesha Das -

Execution Environments serves us the benefits of containerization by solving the issues such as software dependencies, portability. Ansible Execution Environment are Ansible control nodes packaged as container images. There are two kinds of Ansible execution environments

  • Base, includes the following

    • fedora base image
    • ansible core
    • ansible collections : The following set of collections
      ansible.posix
      ansible.utils
      ansible.windows

  • Minimal, includes the following

    • fedora base image
    • ansible core

I have been the release manager for Ansible Execution Environments. After building the images I perform certain steps of tests to check if the versions of different components of the newly built correct or not. So I wrote eercheck to ease the steps of tests.

What is eercheck?

eercheck is a command line tool to test Ansible community execution environment before release. It uses podman py to connect and work with the podman container image, and Python unittest for testing the containers.

eercheck is a command line tool to test Ansible Community Execution Environment before release. It uses podman-py to connect and work with the podman container image, and Python unittest for testing the containers. The project is licensed under GPL-3.0-or-later.

How to use eercheck?

Activate the virtual environment in the working directory.

python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
python -m pip install -r requirements.txt

Activate the podman socket.

systemctl start podman.socket --user

Update vars.json with correct version numbers.Pick the correct versions of the Ansible Collections from the .deps file of the corresponding Ansible community package release. For example for 9.4.0 the Collection versions can be found in here. You can find the appropriate version of Ansible Community Package here. The check needs to be carried out each time before the release of the Ansible Community Execution Environment.

Execute the program by giving the correct container image id.

./containertest.py image_id

Happy automating.