Why can't my ci-cd config file find this Ansible command? - ansible

Question

I'm currently testing out Gitlab CI-CD and Ansible and I wanted to combine the two. I already made an Ansible playbook which is just a small nginx server for testing.
I'm using a Docker container with an Alpine image for my runner.
My .gitlab-ci.yml file looks like this:
stages:
- install
- deploy
install-ansible:
stage: install
script:
- apk add ansible -v
deploy-job:
stage: deploy
script:
- ansible-playbook ansible_roles.yml
The first part of the Pipeline is working but it always fails in the deploy part and I get the following error message:
$ ansible-playbook ansible_roles.yml
/bin/sh: eval: line 128: ansible-playbook: not found
Cleaning up project directory and file based variables
ERROR: Job failed: exit code 127

Answer 1

Install ansible in the same job where it is suppose to run: i.e. drop the install_ansible job and install ansible in deploy-job.
Note: as is, you'll have to install ansible in every stage where you want to use it.
stages:
- deploy
deploy-job:
stage: deploy
before_script:
- apk add ansible -v
script:
- ansible-playbook ansible_roles.yml
As installing packages on each ci run (and possibly in different jobs) can be costly and lengthy, you might consider creating an image already containing ansible, push it to a docker registry and use it directly in your job instead of the default one provided by your runner config:
stages:
- deploy
deploy-job:
stage: deploy
image: my.docker.repo/my/ansible/image:latest
script:
- ansible-playbook ansible_roles.yml
An other solution is to ask your runner administrator to install ansible in the default image used by your runner so that it is always available by default.