There’s no reason anyone needs to use Vagrant to run the ansible tests, and anyone who wishes to use Vagrant can use Vagrant to do so.
Further, there’s no reason to particularly pick Ubuntu either.
Your decision to not run the tests is your mistake, and not having a “vagrant box” file in the hacking directory does nothing about whether you decided to run tests or not.
These two issues are orthogonal.
Unit tests are not going to modify anything, and when we do integration tests, we’re going to do actual multi-tier integration tests that will not require vagrant.
What you see now are basic unit tests, and yes, I run them against my actual server. They are totally safe to run there.
–Michael