Building your first Execution Environment

.. _building_execution_environment:

Building your first Execution Environment

We are going to build an EE that represents an Ansible control node containing standard packages such as ansible-core and Python in addition to an Ansible collection (community.postgresql) and its dependency (the psycopg2-binary Python connector).

To build your first EE:

#. Create a project folder on your filesystem.

.. code-block:: bash

  mkdir my_first_ee && cd my_first_ee

#. Create a execution-environment.yml file that specifies dependencies to include in the image.

.. literalinclude:: yaml/execution-environment.yml :language: yaml

.. note::

  The `psycopg2-binary` Python package is included in the `requirements.txt` file for the collection.
  For collections that do not include `requirements.txt` files, you need to specify Python dependencies explicitly.
  See the `Ansible Builder documentation <https://ansible-builder.readthedocs.io/en/stable/definition/>`_ for details.

#. Build a EE container image called postgresql_ee.

If you use docker, add the --container-runtime docker argument.

.. code-block:: bash

  ansible-builder build --tag postgresql_ee

#. List container images to verify that you built it successfully.

.. code-block:: bash

  podman image list

  localhost/postgresql_ee          latest      2e866777269b  6 minutes ago  1.11 GB

You can verify the image you created by inspecting the Containerfile or Dockerfile in the context directory to view its configuration.

.. code-block:: bash

less context/Containerfile

You can also use Ansible Navigator to view detailed information about the image.

Run the ansible-navigator command, type :images in the TUI, and then choose postgresql_ee.

Proceed to :ref:running_custom_execution_environment and test the EE you just built.

.. seealso::

Running a local container registry for Execution Environments <https://forum.ansible.com/t/running-a-local-container-registry-for-execution-environments/206>_ This guide in the Ansible community forum explains how to set up a local registry for your Execution Environment images.