Ansible Lint testing

As I have been building Ansible playbooks, I want to keep our Ansible playbooks consistent and enforce proper formatting. There is a Python module called ansible-lint that will enforce standardization of playbooks and variable files. Most of the repos I build and use for work already have automated Python unit tests and given I do not want to change the build script to run the ansible-lint checks (or any other checks I’d like to add in the future), I built a test with a pytest test fixure to gather up all the files and run the linter on each file. Additionally, the test I built uses a pytest test fixture, will build a test for each file and then with the pytest-xdist module, I can run the tests in parallel to cutdown on the test execution time. The example I provide, runs in 2.8 seconds (on my machine) where if I run the example without the pytest-xdist module, it ran in 3.8 seconds. I only have 10 files in this repo but as it grows, the pytest-xdist module will significantly cutdown on test execution time.

I’ve found that building a unit test to do checks like this, keeps our build scripts simple as the only requirement is to run pytest instead of customizing it for each new tool I would like to run a check over the codebase. This is just a personal preference but I have found this method of adding checks very valuable.