Running Ansible Molecule in Fedora Silverblue (Molecule running inside a container)

[kees-closed]

I want to use Fedora Silverblue, which is an immutable distribution and stuff like Ansible should run in containers. The creator-ee works great for the purpose of running Molecule, which requires a container in a container. Which the creator-ee image does nicely without adding too much stuff.

When I run podman run --privileged -v /home/USER/git/ansible/:/home/runner/ansible --workdir=/home/runner/ansible quay.io/ansible/creator-ee molecule converge I get the expected output, until I hit a wall since a small subset of the collections are installed.

# /usr/share/ansible/collections/ansible_collections                                                                   
Collection              Version                                                                                        
----------------------- -------                                                                                        
ansible.posix           1.5.4                                                                                          
ansible.windows         2.0.0                                                                                          
awx.awx                 22.4.0                                                                                         
containers.podman       1.10.2                             
kubernetes.core         2.4.0                                                                                          
redhatinsights.insights 1.0.7                                                                                          
theforeman.foreman      3.11.0  

So I created a Dockerfile to add some more collections in a container overlay. Of course there are several ways to do this.

• RUN collections="community.general ansible.netcommon"; for collection in $collections; do ansible-galaxy collection install "$collection" -p /usr/share/ansible/collections/; done
• Or install the collection without providing a root path and it will install it in the user's home directory, which in this container would be /root and then set the ANSIBLE_COLLECTIONS_PATH accordingly.

Is there a better way to do this?