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This tool bends containers using Ansible playbooks and turns them into container images. It has a pluggable builder selection — it is up to you to pick the tool which will be used to construct your container image. Right now the only supported builder is buildah. More to come in the future. Ansible-bender (ab) relies on Ansible connection plugins for performing builds.

tl;dr Ansible is the frontend, buildah is the backend.

The concept is described in following blog posts:

• Building containers with buildah and ansible.
• Ansible and Podman Can Play Together Now.

This project doesn't have an active maintainer right now that would watch issues daily.

If you are a user of ansible-bender and are familiar with Python, please consider becoming a maintainer.

• You can build your container images with buildah as a backend.
• Ansible playbook is your build recipe.
• You are able to set various image metadata via CLI or as specific Ansible vars:
  • working directory
  • environment variables
  • labels
  • user
  • default command
  • exposed ports
• You can do volume mounts during build.
• Caching mechanism:
  • Every task result is cached as a container image layer.
  • You can turn this off with --no-cache.
  • You can disable caching from a certain point by adding a tag no-cache to a task.
• You can stop creating new image layers by adding tag stop-layering to a task.
• If an image build fails, it's committed and named with a suffix -[TIMESTAMP]-failed (so you can take a look inside and resolve the issue).
• The tool tries to find python interpreter inside the base image.
• You can push images you built to remote locations such as:
  • a registry, a tarball, docker daemon, ...
  • podman push is used to perform the push.

You can read more about this project in the documentation:

• Documentation home
• Interface
• Installation
• Configuration
• Usage
• Caching and Layering mechanism
• Contribution guide
• Ansible-bender in OKD