How to Design an End-to-End Ansible Automation Lab with Playbooks, Inventories, Roles, Vault, Dynamic Inventory, and Custom Modules

import os, sys, subprocess, textwrap, stat
BASE = "/content/ansible_lab" if os.path.isdir("/content") else os.path.expanduser("~/ansible_lab")
os.makedirs(BASE, exist_ok=True)
ENV = os.environ.copy()
ENV["ANSIBLE_CONFIG"]      = os.path.join(BASE, "ansible.cfg")
ENV["ANSIBLE_FORCE_COLOR"] = "1"
ENV["PY_COLORS"]           = "0"
def banner(title):
   print("\n" + "=" * 78 + f"\n  {title}\n" + "=" * 78)
def write(relpath, content):
   """Write a dedented file under BASE, creating parent dirs."""
   path = os.path.join(BASE, relpath)
   os.makedirs(os.path.dirname(path), exist_ok=True)
   with open(path, "w") as f:
       f.write(textwrap.dedent(content).lstrip("\n"))
   return path
def sh(cmd, title=None):
   """Run a shell command from BASE, stream stdout, never raise."""
   if title:
       banner(title)
   print(f"$ {cmd}\n")
   p = subprocess.run(cmd, shell=True, cwd=BASE, env=ENV,
                      stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.STDOUT, text=True)
   print(p.stdout)
   return p.returncode
banner("STEP 1 — Installing ansible-core")
subprocess.run([sys.executable, "-m", "pip", "install", "-q", "ansible-core"], check=True)
sh("ansible --version")
write("ansible.cfg", """
   [defaults]
   inventory              = ./inventory.ini
   roles_path             = ./roles
   library                = ./library
   filter_plugins         = ./filter_plugins
   vault_password_file    = ./vault_pass.txt
   host_key_checking      = False
   retry_files_enabled    = False
   interpreter_python     = auto_silent
   callback_result_format = yaml
   deprecation_warnings   = False
   localhost_warning      = False
   nocows                 = 1
   [privilege_escalation]
   become = False
""")
write("inventory.ini", """
   [webservers]
   web1 ansible_connection=local
   web2 ansible_connection=local
   [dbservers]
   db1 ansible_connection=local
   [datacenter:children]
   webservers
   dbservers
""")