Red Hat Dev Spaces

Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces provides cloud-hosted development workspaces based on Eclipse Che. Workspaces run in containers on OpenShift and use the checode editor (a VS Code derivative), making them compatible with the Ansible extension.

Installation

Add the extension to your workspace by including it in your devfile configuration:

components:
  - name: che-code
    container:
      image: quay.io/devspaces/udi-rhel8:latest
    attributes:
      che-code.eclipse.org/vscode-extensions:
        - redhat.ansible

Alternatively, install the extension from the Extensions view within an active Dev Spaces workspace – search for Ansible (publisher: Red Hat, ID: redhat.ansible).

Python environment

The extension automatically discovers Python environments available in the workspace container. When the container image includes ansible-dev-tools, all CLI tools (ansible-lint, ansible-creator, ansible-navigator, molecule, etc.) are available immediately with no additional installation.

For custom workspace images, ensure the image includes:

Python 3.10 or later
ansible-dev-tools (recommended) or individual tools as needed

The extension’s Environment Managers view displays all detected Python interpreters, and the status bar shows the active selection.

Ansible Lightspeed authentication

Ansible Lightspeed (IBM watsonx Code Assistant) authentication works in Dev Spaces through the checode URI scheme. The extension supports OAuth callback redirects for:

checode:// URI scheme (Dev Spaces editor)
Authorities ending in .openshiftapps.com (OpenShift-hosted workspaces)

No additional OAuth configuration is needed – sign in through the Lightspeed view as you would in desktop VS Code.

Dev Container scaffolding

Use ansible-creator to generate .devcontainer/ configurations for Ansible projects:

ansible-creator add resource devcontainer

This produces Docker and Podman variants pre-configured with ansible-dev-tools, making it straightforward to set up consistent workspace images for Dev Spaces or any Dev Container environment.

Considerations

Playbook execution – playbooks run within the workspace container. If the container has network access to target hosts, terminal-based execution works normally. The Unix socket-based progress viewer also works within the container.
MCP server – the MCP server runs inside the workspace container alongside the extension. AI agents connected to the workspace can use the server’s tools for collection discovery, scaffolding, and playbook generation.
Execution environments – the EE view requires a container runtime (Podman or Docker) inside the workspace container. Nested container support depends on your Dev Spaces cluster configuration.