This VM is the control node. The lab creates the user greg (password Lab-Pass-1) with an SSH key and a Git name and email, and installs ansible-core and git. Work as greg. His Ansible project is /home/greg/ansible, with a playbook site.yml.

The managed nodes node1 (10.99.1.11) and node2 (10.99.1.12) are AlmaLinux 10 containers reached over SSH by name. On node1, the bare repository /srv/git/playbooks.git (owned by devops, who has greg's key) has one commit, and greg's clone of it is /home/greg/playbooks, with origin devops@node1:/srv/git/playbooks.git. For a root shell on a node, sudo podman exec -it node1 bash. Everything stays on this VM: the repository lives on a node, not on a hosting service.

Tasks

Copy /home/greg/ansible/site.yml into /home/greg/playbooks, commit it and push it, so that a fresh clone in another directory contains it.
In /home/greg/playbooks, add a .gitignore that ignores ansible-navigator's playbook artifacts (*-artifact-*.json) and log (ansible-navigator.log) and the vault password file .vault_pass, and commit it. Then git status --short doesn't list such files.
Make a second clone of the repository, and push a commit from it. Then make a different commit in /home/greg/playbooks and try to push it: it's rejected. Pull with git pull --no-rebase, then push again, so that git log --graph --oneline shows the merge and node1's repository has it.

Hints

git add, git commit -m, git push; git log origin/main --oneline.
touch site-artifact-2026-10-30T10:00:00.json ansible-navigator.log .vault_pass and git status --short test the .gitignore.
Plain git pull on diverged branches stops with "Need to specify how to reconcile divergent branches"; --no-rebase merges, and git config --global pull.rebase false makes that the default.