CfgMgmtCamp 2025 Ghent

As we all know, infrastructure automation has evolved beyond simple scripting, yet many organizations still rely on copying and pasting tasks from online sources into Ansible playbooks. While it seems expedient and "works on my machine", this approach introduces technical debt, reduces maintainability, and increases security risks. This session will demonstrate how Ansible Development Tools provide an intuitive and integrated experience for authoring automation content as an alternative to ad-hoc practices with disconnected tooling.

During this talk, we'll take a look at tools like the VSCode extension, ansible-creator, ansible-lint, and navigator, as well as Ansible development environments. We'll examine how automation developers can seamlessly author reliable, idempotent playbooks that are tested, validated, and documented. We'll also show how to use the same tools and practices to generate, test, and build Ansible collections to distribute and share your automation content.

By embracing Ansible development tools, organizations can avoid playbooks that increase the risk of deployment failure and move towards robust automation content that has predictable results, scales reliably across environments, and gives teams confidence to rapidly iterate and roll out improvements in production environments.

Building on the best practices and techniques for using Ansible development tools for authoring playbooks and collections, this session focuses on the critical next step: comprehensively testing and validating your Ansible content for production environments. While creating well-structured content is essential, maintaining quality at scale requires automated testing pipelines that can validate each change consistently and reliably.

In this follow-up session, we'll demonstrate testing best practices with Ansible Navigator and Molecule. We'll also explore how to use easily incorporate Ansible testing with Pytest and how the tox-ansible plugin can simply testing across multiple Python interpreters and Ansible versions. We'll also focus on how to transform manual testing procedures into automated workflows using a GitHub Action.

Attendees will leave this talk with the tools and knowledge to stop wondering if their Ansible content will work in production and start knowing that it will!