linuxexpert-practice-labs/labs/ex294/4-3-navigator-inventories-and-settings/README.md

EX294 4.3: Navigator inventories and settings

Make ansible-navigator see the same inventory and ansible.cfg as Ansible does, and give its execution environment a roles directory from outside the project.

Before you start

This VM is the control node. The lab creates the user greg (password Lab-Pass-1) with an SSH key, and installs ansible-core and ansible-navigator (from PyPI, in /opt/le-lab-navigator). Work as greg, in /home/greg/ansible: its ansible.cfg reads the inventory inventory, logs in as devops and becomes root. Its ansible-navigator.yml uses the execution environment image localhost/lab-ee:2.16 (built on this VM from AlmaLinux 10's ansible-core and collections from Ansible Galaxy; no registry or login) in stdout mode, but someone left two more settings in it.

greg also has a role, banner, in /home/greg/roles, outside the project, and the project's banner.yml applies it to every node.

The managed nodes node1 (10.99.1.11) and node2 (10.99.1.12) are AlmaLinux 10 containers reached over SSH by name; on both, devops accepts greg's key and may use sudo without a password. For a root shell on a node, sudo podman exec -it node1 bash.

Tasks

1. Show the inventory's groups with ansible-navigator, in stdout mode and in the interactive browser, and make them match: ansible-navigator inventory -m stdout --graph prints the same as ansible-inventory --graph.
2. Find which ansible.cfg ansible-navigator uses, and make it the project's: ansible-navigator config dump --only-changed -m stdout shows CONFIG_FILE() = /home/greg/ansible/ansible.cfg.
3. Set roles_path in the project's ansible.cfg to /home/greg/roles and run banner.yml with navigator: it fails with "the role 'banner' was not found". Fix it with a volume mount in ansible-navigator.yml, so the run succeeds and every node has /etc/motd.d/banner.

Hints

• ansible-navigator settings --effective --sources -m stdout says where each setting came from: look at ansible.config.path and ansible.inventory.entries.
• ansible-navigator inventory -m interactive: numbers open a view, Esc goes back, :q quits.
• execution-environment: volume-mounts: takes a list of src, dest and options (Z relabels the directory for SELinux).