I built a portable Ansible lab that spins up in seconds using Docker. Thought some of you might find it useful for learning or testing playbooks.
<a href="https://github.com/Yoas1/ansible-handson" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">https://github.com/Yoas1/ansible-handson</a>
The setup:
1 controller (Python + Ansible + code-server IDE on port 8080)
2 workers — one Ubuntu 22.04, one Red Hat UBI 9
Pre-configured SSH keys (Ed25519), inventory, ansible.cfg, Vault, and linters
You literally run <code>docker compose up</code>, open your browser, and start writing/running playbooks. No manual VM setup, no SSH config headaches.
What I like about it:
Hot-reload configs — edit .config/ files and inotifywait auto-applies them via update_config.sh
Pre-commit hooks built in — yamllint, ansible-lint, shellcheck, markdownlint all run before commit
Multi-distro workers — test your playbooks against both Debian-based and RHEL-based systems
Code-server — full VS Code in the browser with Ansible and Python extensions
Would love feedback or ideas for improvement. The full setup is on my GitHub if anyone wants to check it out.
Cheers

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A portable, containerized Ansible lab that runs via Docker Compose, featuring a browser-based VS Code IDE (code-server) on port 8080, one controller node, and two worker nodes (Ubuntu 22.04 and Red Hat UBI 9). Pre-configured with Ed25519 SSH keys, inventory, ansible.cfg, Vault, linters, and pre-commit hooks (yamllint, ansible-lint, shellcheck, markdownlint). Hot-reload support via inotifywait makes config changes instant. Ideal for learning Ansible or testing playbooks without manual VM setup.

Ansible-HandsOn — Containerized Ansible lab with browser IDE