Ansible Runner is a tool and python library that helps when interfacing with Ansible directly or as part of another system whether that be through a container image interface, as a standalone tool, or as a Python module that can be imported. The goal is to provide a stable and consistent interface abstraction to Ansible.
Ansible Runner represents the modularization of the part of Ansible Tower/AWX that is responsible
for running ansible and ansible-playbook tasks and gathers the output from it. It does this by presenting a common interface that doesn't
change, even as Ansible itself grows and evolves.
Part of what makes this tooling useful is that it can gather its inputs in a flexible way (See :ref:`intro`:). It also has a system for storing the output (stdout) and artifacts (host-level event data, fact data, etc) of the playbook run.
There are 3 primary ways of interacting with Runner
- A standalone command line tool (
ansible-runner) that can be started in the foreground or run in the background asynchronously - A reference container image that can be used as a base for your own images and will work as a standalone container or running in Openshift or Kubernetes
- A python module - library interface
.. toctree:: :maxdepth: 2 :caption: Contents: intro install standalone python_interface container