Ansible Development Environment Options

When developing Ansible playbooks, choosing the right environment can greatly impact your productivity, maintainability, and collaboration experience. Whether you prefer running everything on your own machine or leveraging remote resources, there are multiple ways to set up your workflow.

Creating a dedicated Ansible Development Environment streamlines automation content creation by providing a consistent, preconfigured workspace equipped with all necessary tools, libraries, and dependencies. This eliminates “works on my machine” issues, ensuring that playbooks and roles behave the same across local, staging, and production environments. It enhances productivity by integrating linting, testing, and debugging into the workflow, reducing errors before deployment. Additionally, it fosters collaboration by enabling developers to share identical environments—whether through containers, remote servers, or dev workspaces—ensuring predictable results and easier onboarding for new team members. This consistency not only accelerates delivery but also improves the overall quality, maintainability, and reliability of automation code.

In this article, we’ll explore some common options - split between local and remote - to help you decide which fits best for your project needs.

Local Development Options

Local setups are ideal if you want direct control over the environment, low-latency editing and offline capabilities.

1. Python Virtual Environment

   A Python Virtual Environment (venv) allows you to isolate your Ansible dependencies without affecting your system-wide Python installation.

   Benefits:

   • Lightweight and fast to set up.
   • Perfect for working on multiple projects with different Ansible versions.
   • Avoids dependency conflicts with other Python projects.

   Typical Workflow:

   python3 -m venv ansible-venv
   source ansible-venv/bin/activate
   pip install ansible ansible-lint
   

   Best for: Developers who prefer simplicity and minimal tooling overhead.

2. Docker/Podman Desktop

   Running Ansible inside a container ensures a fully reproducible and clean environment every time.

   Benefits:

   • Consistent environment across development machines.
   • Easy to reset or switch between configurations.
   • Ideal for integrating with CI/CD pipelines.

   Best for: Teams needing consistent builds and isolated environments without polluting local systems.

   see Ansible Dev Server using VS Code Dev Containers

Remote Development Options

Remote setups are ideal for collaborative work, resource-heavy tasks, and when you need a consistent environment accessible from anywhere.

3. Code Server

   Code Server runs Visual Studio Code in a browser, allowing you to connect to a remote Ansible-ready environment.

   Benefits:

   • Access from any device with a browser
   • No laptop installation required
   • Same VS Code extensions and settings everywhere
   • Easy to share environments with teammates

   Best for: Distributed teams that want a familiar IDE in a cloud-accessible form.

   see Ansible Dev Server Using Code Server

4. Remote SSH

   With VS Code Remote SSH, you connect to a remote server or VM where Ansible is installed.

   Benefits:

   • Full control over a powerful remote machine
   • Leverage remote compute resourcces while keeping local machine lightweight
   • Minimal setup if SSH access is already available
   • Utilize all Ansible extension capabilities including Lightspeed

   Best for: Developer who want low-latency terminal performance but remote compute power.

   see Ansible Dev Server using VS Code Remote SSH

5. OpenShift Dev Spaces

   OpenShift Dev Spaces provides a cloud-based, containerized development environment integrated directly with OpenShift.

   Benefits:

   • Preconfigured, on-demand development workspaces with Ansible Development tools
   • Consistent environment, each workspace is centrally configured removing development workspace configuration drift.

   Best for: Teams already working in an OpenShift ecosystem who want a fully managed, enterprise-ready dev platform.

   see Boost Ansible developer experience with OpenShift Dev Spaces

Recommendations

• If using Option 2, use the VS Code with Ansible and Dev Containers Extensions approach.
• You can use hybrid approach. For example, prototyping locally in a container [option 2] and then test playbooks in an OpenShift Dev Spaces workspace [option 5] before committing to production. Or use Development Server with Remote SSH [option 4] and configure the VS Code in server to always use Dev Containers [option 2]
• Automate Ansible Dev Server provisioning with Ansible