Ansible-Lint in Air-Gapped Environments: Offline Setup Guide

A guide to running Ansible-Lint in air-gapped environments, covering offline setup, dependency management, and configuration for seamless linting.

Using Ansible-Lint in Air-Gapped Environments: Best Practices and Troubleshooting

When managing infrastructure in air-gapped environments—where systems are isolated from the internet for security purposes—teams often encounter challenges related to software dependencies that require online access. One common tool that may pose issues in such setups is ansible-lint, which is used to enforce coding standards for Ansible playbooks.

In this article, we’ll explore how ansible-lint operates in air-gapped environments, the errors you might encounter, and solutions to help it work smoothly offline.

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Understanding Ansible-Lint and Galaxy Dependencies

ansible-lint is a powerful tool for validating and enforcing standards across Ansible playbooks, roles, and collections. However, ansible-lint often requires access to collections or roles hosted on Ansible Galaxy (galaxy.ansible.com), the public repository for sharing Ansible content. In an air-gapped environment, calls to Galaxy will fail, resulting in errors and incomplete checks.

When trying to use ansible-lint in such an environment, you may encounter errors like:

``plaintext


Unknown error when attempting to call galaxy galaxy.ansible.com/api

This error indicates that ansible-lint is attempting to reach Galaxy to verify or download a collection, which is inaccessible in your air-gapped setup.



Steps to Use Ansible-Lint Offline

To configure ansible-lint to work effectively in an air-gapped environment, follow these best practices.



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1. Use the Offline Mode

Recent versions of ansible-lint include an --offline option that disables all attempts to download collections or roles, ideal for air-gapped setups.



Run the following command to lint your playbooks offline:

`bash


ansible-lint --offline

The --offline flag will ensure that ansible-lint doesn’t try to access Galaxy and instead only works with content available locally.



2. Pre-Download Required Collections and Roles

If your playbooks rely on specific collections or roles from Galaxy, the best approach is to download them in an environment with internet access and then transfer them to the air-gapped environment. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to do this:

1. Download required collections in an internet-enabled environment:

`bash


   ansible-galaxy collection download <namespace.collection> -p /path/to/collections

This command will save the collection as a compressed file (e.g., .tar.gz) in the specified path.



2. Transfer the downloaded files to your air-gapped environment using secure media (USB, secure transfer protocols, etc.).

3. Install the collections in the air-gapped environment:

   In your air-gapped environment, use the following command to install collections from the downloaded files:

`bash


   ansible-galaxy collection install /path/to/collections/namespace-collection-version.tar.gz -p /path/to/collections