ansible-navigator VS molecule

If you need out-of-core modules in an air-gapped environment, you can use a machine with external network access to prepare your execution environment (EE) which is basically a docker image using ansible-builder, add all modules/collections you need, export the resulting image, and import it into your air-gapped server. You can then use ansible-navigator to run Ansible playbooks using that EE.

Please do check out the release notes for all the updates.

Projects to make it easier to write and test Ansible Content. Includes VScode extension, language server, ansible-lint, molecule, ansible-navigator and potentially other development goodies. To see what's planned, and how you can help checkout the foundation-devtools project board

But this does not mean there is no way of using EEs from the command line. For example, Ansible Runner can run playbooks and ad hoc commands using EEs since version 2, but the preferred tool for using EEs locally is Ansible Navigator.

... As a base before mapping in ssh keys. Also, have a look at navigator which works with execution environments: https://github.com/ansible/ansible-navigator

Hell, the ansible roles I maintain use Molecule for testing.

The Ansible team announced at AnsibleFest and Ansible Community Days last month that Molecule will be released as a developer preview on its way to being a fully supported part of the Ansible platform. In order to achieve this, Molecule will need to be streamlined and refocused as a test runner for functional testing of Ansible playbooks and roles using Ansible itself. This will require a number of breaking changes to happen before releasing “Molecule 6” in order to do all of this. You can read about the changes here and we welcome your questions and feedback on their roll out: https://github.com/ansible-community/molecule/milestone/35

I would recommend you to use roles instead of just playbooks and to test them with molecule. Molecule allows you to quickly test your Ansible roles in a fresh Arch Linux podman container, completely isolated from your real system.

Please post comments on https://github.com/ansible-community/molecule/discussions/3555

Projects to make it easier to write and test Ansible Content. Includes VScode extension, language server, ansible-lint, molecule, ansible-navigator and potentially other development goodies. To see what's planned, and how you can help checkout the foundation-devtools project board

I’m assuming you are using Molecule: https://github.com/ansible-community/molecule

Please upvote your prefered answer from the https://github.com/ansible-community/molecule/discussions/3130 survey which proposed joining ansible-lint and ansible-molecule channels when we move them from freenode irc to libera.chat. There is also an option to keep the channels separated.

Just as a heads up, Molecule has a very active discussion area on GitHub.

Ansible Molecule

But to be fair, a lot has changed since 2017 :)