Design and Test Ansible Playbooks with Vagrant

Testing infrastructure changes in production is risky. A disposable local test environment lets you validate Ansible playbooks safely before deploying to real servers.

Why You Need a Test Environment

Risk Mitigation: Catch errors before they affect production systems.

Faster Iteration: Test and refine playbooks without waiting for cloud resources.

Cost Savings: No cloud costs for development and testing.

Confidence: Deploy with certainty that your automation works.

Vagrant for Ansible Testing

Vagrant provides:

• Quick VM provisioning
• Reproducible environments
• Integration with Ansible
• Multi-machine setups

Workflow

1. Define Infrastructure: Create a Vagrantfile describing your VMs
2. Provision with Ansible: Use Vagrant’s Ansible provisioner
3. Test Changes: Run playbooks against local VMs
4. Iterate Quickly: Destroy and recreate as needed
5. Deploy with Confidence: Apply tested playbooks to production

Example Structure

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.define "webserver" do |web|
    web.vm.box = "ubuntu/focal64"
    web.vm.provision "ansible" do |ansible|
      ansible.playbook = "playbook.yml"
    end
  end
end

Best Practices

• Match Production: Use similar OS versions and configurations
• Version Control: Track Vagrantfiles alongside playbooks
• Automate Testing: Integrate with CI/CD pipelines
• Document: Keep setup instructions with your code

The complete example code is available in .articles/1_vagrant_101 directory.

Read the full article on Medium: Design and Test Ansible playbook with Vagrant