Local dev using Orbstack on Mac

Orbstack is a great tool for local development on Mac (especially on Apple Silicon Macs when you need to develop for Intel). Here's a an example of a local development environment for Ansible using an Orbstack virtual machine.

See: https://orbstack.dev

Example: Developing Ansible for Red Hat 8

A simple example develping Ansible locally using Rocky Linux 8 as a substitute for Red Hat 8.

Prerequisites:

• Install Orbstack
• Ensure Orbstack is running.

We will:

• clone this repo
• change to the repo directory
• start a VM and configure it via the cloud config file: vm_config.yaml
• change to the ansible directory
• run some basic Ansible checks
• run a playbook
• stop the VM
• delete the VM.

Clone this repo then:

cd orbstack-local-dev  # change to the repo directory
./up.sh                # start the test VM and connect via a terminal
cd ansible             # change to the ansible directory
./ci.sh                # run basic checks: YAML linting / playbook syntax check
./run_playbook.sh      # run a sample playbook

Then to test, open http://dev8.orb.local in a web browser.

Finally, to shut down:

exit                   # exit the vm
./down.sh              # shut down the test VM
./down.sh --delete     # delete the test vm