ansible-navigator

Really short post this week! Had no motivation to study with a cold..

Learned some ansible-navigator stuff. It’s a pretty neat tool. I like seeing all of a host’s our group’s variables from there.

Ansible Navigator`

ansible-navigator setup

Register subscription manager

subscription-manager register

Show available subscriptions

subscription-manager list --available

Scroll down and copy the pool id:

Attach to the subscription:

subscription-manager attach --pool=2c94b9169c25391b019c690720d56541

Show repos and grab the most recent one:

subscription-manager repos --list | grep ansible

Install the most recent repo from above (not the source or debug):

subscription-manager repos --enable ansible-automation-platform-2.6-for-rhel-9-x86_64-rpms

Install necessary packages:

dnf -y install ansible-navigator ansible-core rhel-system-roles vim

Log in to redhat’s podman registry to be able to pull EE containers:

podman login registry.redhat.io

Using ansible-navigator

View subcommands

ansible-navigator --help

Run:

ansible-navigator

Grab additional ees:

podman pull quay.io/ansible/creator-ee

ansible-navigator will detect the above automatically.

Use : to run the listed commands.

esc to go back.

Generate config file, use tmp first so ansible-navigato doesn’t try to read the file immediately:

ansible-navigator settings --gs --pp never --dc false > tmp

mv tmp ansible-navigator.yml

Or you can make it available while in any directory for your user:

mv ansible-navigator.yml ~/.ansible-navigator.yml

Uncomment:

  execution-environment:

  pull:
  
  policy: tag

Change policy to only pull ee image if it’s missing, this will make it much faster to open ansible-navigator:

      policy: missing

You can also change the default ee from this file:

#     # Specify the name of the execution environment image
#     image: quay.io/organization/custom-ee:latest

You can override this when calling from the command line:

ansible-navigator collections --eei ee-supported-rhel8

Using ansible-navigator

There is no man page for ansible-navigator!

Run a playbook with output on terminal:

ansible-navigator run -m stdout playbook.yml

The application runs in the ee container, which is running as the root inside the container.

You can use all the same options for ansible-playbook when you use ansible-navigator run.

By default, ansible-navigator leaves playbook artifacts that log how the playbook run went.

# ls
anaconda-ks.cfg
ansible-navigator.log
simple-artifact-2026-02-18T12:01:26.604766+00:00.json
simple-artifact-2026-02-18T12:04:22.066603+00:00.json
simple.yml

Run without generating artifacts with --pae false:

ansible-navigator run -m stdout --pae false simple.yml

Navigator will not prompt for password with -K option unless you pass the -m stdout option

Ansible-navigator inventory

Can view inventory and associated variables from the TUI.

View inventory as a graph: ansible-navigator inventory -m stdout --graph

ansible-navigator config

Shows current settings as listed in ansible.cfg

Search for a string:

:f user

Clear the search:

:f

Show config options in a pager:

ansible-navigator config -m stdout list

ansible-navigator exec

Navigator will bind mount the directory “collections” in the current working directory and install any collections listed there into the execution environment.

Pull up interactive shell in the execution environment:

ansible-navigator exec

ansible-navigator doc

Used like ansible-doc.

That’s all for this week!