ansible-bender¶

Tool which bends containers using Ansible playbooks and turns them into container images. It has a pluggable builder selection — it is up to you to pick the tool which will be used to construct your container image. Right now the only supported builder is buildah. More to come in the future. Ansible-bender (ab) relies on Ansible connection plugins for performing builds.

Features¶

You can build your container images with buildah as a backend.
Ansible playbook is your build recipe.
You are able to set various image metadata via CLI or as specific Ansible vars:
- working directory
- environment variables
- labels
- user
- default command
- exposed ports
You can do volume mounts during build.
Caching mechanism:
- Every task result is cached as a container image layer.
- You can turn this off with --no-cache.
- You can disable caching from a certain point by adding a tag no-cache to a task.
You can stop creating new image layers by adding tag stop-layering to a task.
If an image build fails, it’s committed and named with a suffix -[TIMESTAMP]-failed (so you can take a look inside and resolve the issue).
The tool tries to find python interpreter inside the base image.
You can push images you built to remote locations such as:
- a registry, a tarball, docker daemon, …
- podman push is used to perform the push.