VENV: Ansible

Ansible and Molecule are popular tools for configuration management and testing in the world of DevOps. To avoid conflicts between different projects and their dependencies, it is recommended to use a virtual environment for each project. In this blog post, we’ll show you how to set up and use a virtual environment using Python’s built-in venv module on macOS and CentOS 7.

Pre-requisites

#

Before we begin, you’ll need the following:

• Python 3 installed on your system
• pip installed on your system
• Basic knowledge of the command line interface

On Centos7

#

1. Open a terminal window and create a directory for your project:
   • mkdir my-ansible-project
   • cd my-ansible-project
2. Install the python3-venv package:
   • sudo yum install python3-venv
3. Create a new virtual environment:
   • python3 -m venv venv
     • This will create a new directory named venv in your project directory, which contains the virtual environment.
4. Activate the virtual environment:
   • source venv/bin/activate
5. Install Ansible and Molecule:
   • pip install ansible molecule
6. Verify that Ansible and Molecule are installed:
   • ansible --version
   • molecule --version
     • This should display the version of Ansible and Molecule installed in the virtual environment.
7. When you’re done working with Ansible and Molecule, you can deactivate the virtual environment:
   • deactivate

On OSX

#

1. Open a terminal window and create a directory for your project:
   • mkdir my-ansible-project
   • cd my-ansible-project
2. Create a new virtual environment:
   • python3 -m venv venv
     • This will create a new directory named venv in your project directory, which contains the virtual environment.
3. Activate the virtual environment:
   • source venv/bin/activate
4. Install Ansible and Molecule:
   • pip install ansible molecule
5. Verify that Ansible and Molecule are installed:
   • ansible --version
   • molecule --version
     • This should display the version of Ansible and Molecule installed in the virtual environment.
6. When you’re done working with Ansible and Molecule, you can deactivate the virtual environment:
   • deactivate

Using the Virtual Environment

#

To use Ansible and Molecule inside the virtual environment, you need to activate the environment first.

This is done with the source command:

source venv/bin/activate

Once the virtual environment is activated, you can use Ansible and Molecule as you normally would. When you’re done, you can deactivate the virtual environment with the deactivate command:

deactivate

Conclusion

#

In this blog post, we showed you how to set up and use a virtual environment using Python’s built-in venv module on macOS and CentOS 7 for Ansible and Molecule. Using a virtual environment helps keep your projects isolated and avoids conflicts between different dependencies.