# Ansible Runner

Ansible Runner is a tool and python library that helps when interfacing with Ansible directly or as part of another system whether that be through a container image interface, as a standalone tool, or as a Python module that can be imported. The goal is to provide a stable and consistent interface abstraction to Ansible. This allows Ansible to be embedded into other systems that don’t want to manage the complexities of the interface on their own (such as CI/CD platforms, Jenkins, or other automated tooling).

Ansible Runner represents the modularization of the part of Ansible AWX that is responsible for running `ansible` and `ansible-playbook` tasks and gathers the output from it. It does this by presenting a common interface that doesn’t change, even as Ansible itself grows and evolves.

Part of what makes this tooling useful is that it can gather its inputs in a flexible way (See Introduction to Ansible Runner:). It also has a system for storing the output (stdout) and artifacts (host-level event data, fact data, etc) of the playbook run.

There are 3 primary ways of interacting with Runner

- A standalone command line tool (`ansible-runner`) that can be started in the foreground or run in the background asynchronously

- A python module - library interface

Ansible Runner can also be configured to send status and event data to other systems using a plugin interface, see Sending Runner Status and Events to External Systems.

Examples of this could include:

- Sending status to Ansible AWX

- Sending events to an external logging service

Contents:

- Introduction to Ansible Runner
- Installing Ansible Runner
- Community
- Sending Runner Status and Events to External Systems
- Using Runner as a standalone command line tool
- Using Runner as a Python Module Interface to Ansible
- Using Runner with Execution Environments
- Remote job execution
- Developer Documentation

# Indices and tables

- Index

- Module Index

- Search Page