Installation

$ pip3 install ansible-bender

If you are brave enough, please install bender directly from git master:

$ pip3 install git+https://github.com/ansible-community/ansible-bender

If pip3 command is not available on your system, you can run pip like this:

$ python3 -m pip install ...

Requirements (host)

Pip takes care of python dependencies, but ansible-bender also requires a few binaries to be present on your host system:

  • Podman

  • Buildah

  • Ansible

    • Ansible needs to be built against python 3

  • Python 3.6 or later (python 3.5 or earlier are not supported and known not to be working)

Last two requirements can be pretty tough: you can always run bender in a privileged container.

Setting up buildah and podman

If you run ansible-bender as root, you don’t need to set up anything. Just install the packages and you are good to go. This is the preferred way — buildah and podman are much more efficient when using the in-kernel overlay filesystem and you will encounter less issues than with the rootless mode.

On the other hand, if you want to utilize the rootless mode, you need to set up the UID mapping. It is documented in podman’s documentation. All you need to do is to add an entry into /etc/subuid and /etc/subgid:

$ sudo sh -c "printf \"\n$(whoami):100000:65536\n\" >>/etc/subuid"
$ sudo sh -c "printf \"\n$(whoami):100000:65536\n\" >>/etc/subgid"

You should consult podman’s troubleshooting guide if you are running into issues.

Requirements (base image)

  • python interpreter — ansible-bender will try to find it (alternatively you can specify it via --python-interpreter).

    • It can be python 2 or python 3 — on host, you have to have python 3 but inside the base image, it doesn’t matter — Ansible is able to utilize python 2 even if it’s invoked with python 3 on the control machine.

Requirements (Ansible playbook)

None.

Bender copies the playbook you provide so that it can be processed. hosts variable is being overwritten in the copy and changed to the name of the working container — where the build happens. So it doesn’t matter what’s the content of the hosts variable.