The Operator SDK project is a really cool framework to help you build Kubernetes operators. I’ve been really intrigued about the Ansible style operators as they seem to offer a great deal of convenience.

When developing and debugging operators it is really useful to be able to run them locally without needing to install an image in a registry somewhere. I’ve been trying to get an ansible based operator working with the operator-sdk in local mode and struggling with the upstream instructions.

This is what finally worked for me in Fedora 30 after:

1. make sure ansible is installed
2. install the following packages through dnf

   python3-ansible-runner
   python3-psutil
   python3-openshift
   

3. install the http runner for ansible with the following command:

   pip3 install --user ansible-runner-http
   

4. make a symbolic link for /usr/bin/python to /usr/bin/python3. i still don’t understand this one, but for some reason when i run the ansible operator it tries to run python2 even though it knows where the python3 binary is located.
5. you will most likely need to have a cluster-admin role if you are running on OpenShift

After all this I was able to run operator-sdk up local and my operator was running fine. Now on to the debugging ;)

Update 31 July 2019

One more thing to keep in mind when you are running local operators. The watches.yaml file will be set to look for things in /opt/ansible/, so I needed to make a symlink from /opt/ansible to the root of my project directory. You could also just change the watches file.