Ansible provisioning without internet access - ansible

Question

I know that you can setup proxy in Ansible to provision behind corporate network:
https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/user_guide/playbooks_environment.html
like this:
environment:
http_proxy: http://proxy.example.com:8080
Unfortunately in my case there is no access to internet from the server at all. Downloading roles locally and putting them under /roles folder seems solve the role issue, but roles still download packages from the internet when using:
package:
name: package-name
state: present
I guess there is no way to make dry/pre run so Ansible downloads all the packages, then push that into repo and run Ansible provision using locally downloaded packages?

Answer 1

This isn't really a question about Ansible, as all Ansible is doing is running the relevant package management system on the target host (i.e. yum, dnf or apt or whatever). So it is a question of what solution the specific package management tool provides, for this case.
There are a variety of solutions and for example in the Centos/RHEL world you can:
Create a basic mirror
Install a complete enterprise management system
There is another class of tool generally called an artefact repository. These started out life as tools to store binaries built from code, but have added a bunch of features to act as a proxy and cache packages from a wide variety of sources (OS Packages, PIP, NodeJS, Docker, etc). Two examples that have limited free offerings:
Nexus
Artifactory
They of course still need to collect those packages from a source, so at some point those are going to have to be downloaded to placed within these systems.

Answer 2

Like clockworknet pointed out this is more related to the RHEL package handling. Setting up local mirror somewhere inside the closed network can provide a solution in this situation. More info on "How to create a local mirror of the latest update for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, 6, 7 without using Satellite server?": https://access.redhat.com/solutions/23016

Answer 3

My solution:
Install Sonatype Nexus 3
create one or more yum proxy repositories
https://help.sonatype.com/repomanager3/formats/yum-repositories
use Ansible to add these proxies via yum_repository
https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/modules/yum_repository_module.html
yum_repository:
name: proxy-repo
description: internal proxy repo
baseurl: https://your-nexus.server/url-to-repo```
note: did that for APT and works fine, would expect the same for yum