Chapter 4. Tools and components

Ansible Builder is a command line tool that automates the process of building automation execution environments by using the metadata defined in various Ansible Collections or by the user.

Before Ansible Builder was developed, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform users could run into dependency issues and errors when creating custom virtual environments or containers that included all of the required dependencies installed.

Now, with Ansible Builder, you can easily create a customizable automation execution environments definition file that specifies the content you want to be included in your automation execution environments such as collections, third-party Python requirements, and system-level packages. This allows you to fulfill all of the necessary requirements and dependencies to get jobs running.

Automation content navigator is a command line, content-creator-focused tool with a text-based user interface. You can use Automation content navigator to:

You cannot execute Ansible commands that are part of Ansible core, such as ansible-playbook, in containers such as automation execution environments. Use Automation content navigator which includes a set of the Ansible CLI commands that are compatible with automation execution environments. Automation content navigator also includes a more detailed output within its text-based user interface.

Automation Hub provides a place for Red Hat subscribers to quickly find and use content that is supported by Red Hat and our technology partners to deliver additional reassurance for the most demanding environments.

At a high level, Automation Hub provides an overview of all partners participating and providing certified, supported content.

From a central view, users can dive deeper into each partner and check out the collections.

Additionally, a searchable overview of all available collections is available.

Using Ansible on the command line is a useful way to execute tasks that you don’t repeat very frequently; for repeated tasks, writing a playbook is recommended.

An ad-hoc command for Ansible on the command line follows this structure:

$ ansible [pattern] -m [module] -a "[module options]"