Ansible Automation Platform - include directories on filesystem to execution environments

Ansible provides the ability to source additional files containing variables using the 'vars_files' option in a play. This is not available by default when using execution environments but there's a easy fix to that problem which hides in the settings. The option is named 'Paths to expose to isolated jobs', which takes podman-style mount paths that allows to mount directories and files into the execution environment.

I would recommend to configure / modify any setting in Ansible Automation Platform / AWX using the ansible collections. Here's a quick playbook to deploy the setting:

 ---  
 - hosts: localhost  
   become: false  
   gather_facts: false  
   vars:  
     aap_procotol: https  
     aap_hostname: "{{ groups['ansible_tower'][0] }}"  
     aap_admin_user: admin  
     aap_admin_pass: "{{ vault['aap']['admin_password'] }}"  
   tasks:  
     - name: create ~/.tower_cli.cfg  
       ansible.builtin.copy:  
         dest: ~/.tower_cli.cfg  
         content: |  
           [general]  
           host = {{ aap_protocol }}://{{ aap_hostname }}  
           username = {{ aap_admin_user }}  
           password = {{ aap_admin_pass }}  
           verify_ssl = false  
           format = human  
           certificate =  
           verbose = false  
           description_on = false  
           oauth_token =  
           use_token = false  
           color = true  
 - hosts: ansible_tower  
   become: false  
   gather_facts: false  
   collections:  
     - awx.awx  
   tasks:  
     - name: configure execution environment directory mounting  
       awx.awx.settings:  
         name: AWX_ISOLATION_SHOW_PATHS  
         value:  
           - "/etc/pki/ca-trust:/etc/pki/ca-trust:O"  
           - "/usr/share/pki/:/usr/share/pki:O"  
           - "/my/custom/directory:/my/custom/mountpoint:O"  
         tower_config_file: ~/.tower_cli.cfg  
 ...

The big advantage configuring aap using ansible is a infrastructure-as-code style configuration and deployment of your automation platform itself and reproducibility for newer installs / re-deploys.

Feel free to comment and / or suggest a topic.

Comments

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