Format your code with Ansible-Lint

General

ESLint and Prettier are famous linting tools for web development to fix formatting/styling issues automatically. With Ansible-Lint you can format your playbooks now too.

Be aware that it does not fix your code-syntax. Your ansible file has to be exetucable before we can format it with ansible-lint.

Install

You can install Ansible-Lint with one of the following commands:

pip3 install ansible-lint
sudo apt install ansible-lint

Config

Lets take this helloworld.yml playbook as example.

---
- name: Hello World!
  hosts: localhost
  connection: local

  tasks:
    - name: debug
      debug:
        msg: hello world

The yml itself works fine but there are two style issues. If we issue the command ansible-lint helloworld.yml we get the following output.

WARNING  Listing 2 violation(s) that are fatal
fqcn[action-core]: Use FQCN for builtin module actions (debug).
helloworld.yml:6 Use `ansible.builtin.debug` or `ansible.legacy.debug` instead.

name[casing]: All names should start with an uppercase letter.
helloworld.yml:6 Task/Handler: debug

It tells us that we should type the full module name of debug and to begin the taskname with an uppercase letter.

If we only want to fix the fqcn module name we can use the following command.

ansible-lint helloworld.yml --fix fqcn

You have also the option to use the all tag to fix all style issues.

ansible-lint helloworld.yml --fix all

Now our yml file looks like this

---
- name: Hello World!
  hosts: localhost
  connection: local

  tasks:
    - name: Debug
      ansible.builtin.debug:
        msg: hello world

We successfully fixed all style issues.

The default profile is production which has the highest standards but you can use other profiles with the command.

ansible-lint --profile=safety helloworld.yml

Checkout Ansible-Lint Profiles for the documentation of the profiles.

VSCode Extension

The Redhat Ansible extension for VSCode has an integration for the Ansible-Lint module.

You can install the VSCode extension by pressing CTRL + SHIFT + P in VSCode.

Now just copy/paste ext install redhat.ansible and the extension will be installed automatically. If you installed Ansible-Lint then the VSCode extension will display formatting issues in your YMLs directly.

Python Extension

For Python linting I use the VSCode extension pylint by Microsoft which shows me the errors directly in VSCode.

For Python formatting I use truff that can be installed in your python venv.

pip install ruff
ruff check main.py #just lists errors
ruff format main.py

Thanks for reading my article. If you have any questions or recommendations you can message me via arvednetblog@gmail.com.