Setting up your development environment

Now that we have covered IDE basics, let us have a look at what Ansible development tools are and how they can help you efficiently create Ansible content.

In this lesson, you will:

• Learn about the tools that are part of Ansible development tools.

Overview

Ansible development tools are a suite of integrated and supported capabilities included with Ansible Automation Platform. Accessible through Ansible VS Code extension, Ansible development tools support platform engineering and developers at any skill level to accurately build, test, and deploy automation modules and Ansible Playbooks with speed and accuracy.

The curated list of tools installed as part of the Ansible development tools includes:

• Ansible builder automates the process of creating execution environments using the schemas and tooling. 
• Ansible creator is a scaffolder to generate all your Ansible projects and content.
• Ansible navigator is a text-based user interface (TUI) to help you develop and troubleshoot  Ansible Playbooks with execution environments.
• Ansible lint checks playbooks for style errors, best practices, and other issues to ensure the integrity of your code.
• Ansible sign is a utility for signing and verifying Ansible project directory contents to ensure a secure software supply chain.
• Ansible Molecule aids in the development and testing of Ansible Content Collections, playbooks, and roles.
• Ansible development environment helps build and manage virtual environments for content development.
• Pytest-ansible enables the use of Ansible testing functions for modules and plugins built in Python. 
• Tox-ansible is a plugin that dynamically creates a full matrix of Python interpreters and ansible-core version environments for running integration and sanity checks.

Congratulations

Well done on completing the Foundations for Ansible learning path. Do you want to learn more about working with Ansible playbooks? Try our learning path YAML Essentials for Ansible Automation Platform next. Or, go to our Ansible learning hub to find more.

Below, you will find additional resources to continue your Ansible journey.

Additional resources:

• Start a free trial for Ansible Automation Platform
• Self-paced lab: Get started with Ansible navigator 
• Documentation: Execution environments

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