Testing Ansible Code with Molecule

1. Preparing the Environment

To avoid polluting the system Python, all the dependencies are installed in a virtual environment.

python3 -m venv .venv # create a virtual environment for Ansible/Molecule
source .venv/bin/activate # activate it
pip install --upgrade pip # upgrade pip
pip install ansible molecule molecule-plugins # install Ansible and Molecule

Check installation:

ansible --version
molecule --version

This repository provides a molecule_init.sh script located in the bin directory. To quickly activate the environment, source this script.

source bin/molecule_init.sh

1.1 Podman installation

Containerization makes testing much faster and easier because you do not need external dependencies. Not all tests can be performed in a container, but it’s a good starting point that will cover a large number of tests before executing the rest on real target systems. To run the tests in containers, you need to install a container manager. Podman is selected for execution under macOS.

brew install podman

Once Podman is installed, initialize and start the Podman machine, then check its status:

podman machine init
podman machine start
podman info