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Chapter 2. Ansible rulebooks

Event-Driven Ansible controller provides the interface in which Event-Driven Ansible automation performs. Ansible rulebook provides the framework for Event-Driven Ansible automation. Ansible rulebook is essentially a collection of rulesets, which in turn, consists of one or more sources, rules, and conditions.

2.1. Decision Environments
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Event-Driven Ansible includes, by default, an ansible.eda collection, which contains sample sources, event filters and rulebooks. All the collections, ansible rulebooks and their dependencies use a Decision Environment, which is an image that can be run on either Podman or Kubernetes.

In Decision Environments, sources, which are typically Python code, are distributed through ansible-collections. They inject external events into a rulebook for processing. The rulebook consists of the following:

  • The python interpreter
  • Java Runtime Environment for Drools rule engine
  • ansible-rulebook python package
  • ansible.eda collection

You can use the base Decision Environment and build your own customized Decision Environments with additional collections and collection dependencies. You can build a Decision Environment using a Dockerfile or optionally you can deploy your CA certificate into the image.

2.2. Rulebook actions
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A rulebook specifies actions to be performed when a rule is triggered. A rule gets triggered when the events match the conditions for the rules. The following actions are currently supported:

  • run_job_template
  • run_playbook (only supported with ansible-rulebook CLI)
  • debug
  • print_event
  • set_fact
  • post_event
  • retract_fact
  • shutdown
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