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Frequently asked questions

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How does it work?

tox will, by default, create a Python virtual environment for a given environment. tox-ansible adds Ansible collection specific build and test logic to tox by delegating collection installation to ansible-dev-environment (ade).

For each test environment, tox-ansible runs ade install as a pre-command which:

  1. Installs the requested version of ansible-core (from PyPI, a GitHub branch, or a URL).
  2. Builds and installs the collection from the current directory into the virtual environment's site-packages.
  3. Discovers and installs Python dependencies declared by the collection and its transitive dependencies using ansible-builder introspect.

tox-ansible also installs any Python dependencies from a test-requirements.txt (or requirements-test.txt) and requirements.txt file.

tox-ansible sets the ANSIBLE_COLLECTIONS_PATH environment variable to "." (the current directory). This prevents ansible-core from scanning system and user collection paths and isolates the collection under test. The collection itself is installed into the virtual environment's site-packages via an editable install (ade install -e), so Ansible discovers it through Python's import machinery. The pytest-ansible plugin injects the ANSIBLE_COLLECTIONS_PATH environment variable into the collection loader so ansible-core can locate the collection.

pytest is used to run both the unit and integration tests. ansible-test sanity is used to run the sanity tests.

For more details on the architecture and how tox-ansible and ade work together, see the Architecture page.

For full configuration examples for each of the sanity, integration, and unit tests including the commands being run and the environment variables being set and passed, see the following:

See the tox documentation for more information on tox.