Reproducible Ansible with Execution Environments

Table of Contents Table of Contents What an Execution Environment Actually Contains Why Containerize Ansible at All The Pieces A Worked Example: An EE for Homelab Automation execution-environment.yml requirements.yml requirements.txt bindep.txt Building It ansible-navigator: Running Plays Against the EE Other Navigator Subcommands Worth Knowing CI: Pinning the Image, Not the Tool Updating an EE Trade-offs and When It’s Overkill Summary Common First-Time Pitfalls References If you’ve run Ansible for any non-trivial length of time, you’ve hit the control-node problem. A laptop accumulates a ~/.ansible/collections/ tree, a venv with a dozen Python libraries pinned to whatever pip install gave you that afternoon, and a handful of distro packages (sshpass, git, sometimes kerberos headers) that you only remember are there when a teammate clones the repo and the same playbook fails for them. CI papers over part of that with a fresh container per job, but only as long as you keep the install…