Installing AWX using podman

Archives AWX Project
1

Hi all - I’m wondering if anyone here has any guidance on using podman to run AWX, specifically some basic tutorial?

I understand it’s not supported but have found some references online suggesting it can be done, wondering if anyone has actually done it.

2

I’ve been looking for the same thing. Until then, I must run my AWX containers on a Ubuntu system.

3

You can run version 15 on podman, but newer versions need to be ran on k8s nodes/clusters. Single nodes aren’t recommended for production.

Here’s what I used to get v15 up and running in podman:
https://redhatnordicssa.github.io/ansible-podman-containers-1
https://redhatnordicssa.github.io/ansible-podman-containers-2

4

Thanks Keith.

So to be clear if it’s limited to version 15, then it would be stuck on an old version of ansible, is that right? My main issue right now is using ansible 2.9.18 because I’m limited to AWX 17, and therefore missing out on some critical new ansible features.

Cheers,
Shane

5

That’s correct. The version used by those instructions is limited to version 15 and I’m fairly certain it won’t go beyond version 15.

The instructions provide some great roles to get Ansible up and running in podman though so regardless of the limitation of the exact images being used, it does give some good insight as to how you could figure out how to make AWX work in podman. The newer versions of AWX all use AWX operator which is dependent on using k8s. You can run k8s on a single server similar to podman however it’s not fantastic. I did a test deployment like that and just letting it sit for awhile, it seemed to have issues. I didn’t bother troubleshooting it because it was just a test deployment.

I’ve just spent several months researching, learning, and deploying k8s for this same reason. I now have an upgradable HA deployment of AWX 23.2.0 running and I’m in progress to migrate my jobs over to it. Upgrading the version of the k8s cluster will be the next challenge at some point.

Good Luck on getting it to work in Podman, but I think you should cut your losses and just go-to k8s as there’s already plenty of methods to that.

6

Thanks for the comprehensive response.

Good advice, but I’m a bit constrained by the general desired strategic direction of the company. So we’ll either live with the current limitations or look at k8s at some point. Thanks again for the information and advice.