[qbasic_forever]

Grab the ansible-runner image from dockerhub and it's a great slimmed down image to run ansible: https://ansible-runner.readthedocs.io/en/stable/container.ht...

To provision stuff _inside_ your docker container from ansible I've found packer is the easiest way to do it: https://www.packer.io/docs/provisioners/ansible-local There was apparently a tool called ansible-bender that did something similar but was abandoned. Packer makes it easy to define a container that's provisioned with a local ansible playbook.

Ultimately though I think using ansible with containers is a code smell. If you provision in a container with ansible you have to pull in an entire Python install, and that blows up your container size fast. You can do multi-stage builds and carefully extract the stuff you need but it's a real pain. IMHO minimal shell scripts that run in very tightly defined and controlled environments of the dockerfile (i.e. they don't have to be super flexible or support any and every system, just this container) are the way to go.