Sane Development Environments for Ansible Automation Code

Table of Contents Table of Contents The Stack I Actually Use Dev Container and Execution Environment Are Different Jobs Host Preparation The devcontainer.json Those Privileges Are Not Decorative What Is Actually in the Image? Why This Is Better Than a Carefully Tended Venv Upstream Alternative: Community Ansible Dev Tools The Editor Is a Separate Choice A Practical Team Policy Further Reading Ansible has a deceptively low barrier to entry. Install a Python package, write a YAML file, and you have automation. Six months later the same workstation has three Python virtual environments, two copies of ansible-core, collections in both the project and ~/.ansible, and an ansible-lint version that disagrees with CI. It still works, but nobody can say exactly why it works. That is not a sane development environment. For work intended for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, my preferred answer is a containerized workspace built from the same downstream, Red Hat-packaged toolchain that the…