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:

1. Create a project folder on your filesystem.

   mkdir my_first_ee && cd my_first_ee
   

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

   version: 3
   
   images:
     base_image:
       name: registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora:42
   
   dependencies:
     python_interpreter:
       package_system: python3
     ansible_core:
       package_pip: ansible-core
     ansible_runner:
       package_pip: ansible-runner
     system:
     - openssh-clients
     - sshpass
     galaxy:
       collections:
       - name: community.postgresql
   

   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 for details.

3. Build a EE container image called postgresql_ee.

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

   ansible-builder build --tag postgresql_ee
   

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

   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.

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 Running your EE and test the EE you just built.