Aborting, target uses selinux but python bindings (libselinux-python) aren't installed

The problem

When running Ansible in a Python virtual environment. Or when running molecule --debug test, you encounter the following error:

Aborting, target uses selinux but python bindings (libselinux-python) aren't installed!

The investigation

There are a couple of possible root causes for this:

1. Maybe the error is right, and that libselinux-python is not installed. 

2. Python libraries for selinux are not available in a Python virtual environment.

The solution

To make sure libselinux-python is installed on Fedora:

sudo dnf install -y libselinux-python

To make sure libselinux-python is installed on CentOS/Fedora:
sudo yum install -y libselinux-python

Imaging you have a virtual environment called ansible26, you first need to activate that virtual environment and then copy the Python libraries for selinux over:

workon ansible26

cp -r /usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/selinux $VIRTUAL_ENVv/lib/python2.7/site-packages

cp /usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/_selinux.so $VIRTUAL_ENVv/lib/python2.7/site-packages

Please note that workon is a command from https://virtualenvwrapper.readthedocs.io/ and if you haven't installed virtualenvwrapper, you would rather navigate to your virtual environment directory, and then run source bin/activate

Credits to https://github.com/metacloud/molecule/issues/1209 where I found this solution.

False positive: ansible-lint reports [ANSIBLE0002] Trailing whitespace when there are none

The problem

When running ansible-lint on a Ansible role, it reported [ANSIBLE0002] Trailing whitespace on every line in one of my task files, like shown in the example below:


(vansible23)[audun@hostname my-role]$ ansible-lint .
[ANSIBLE0002] Trailing whitespace
/home/audun/git/my-role/tasks/main.yml:1
---
[ANSIBLE0002] Trailing whitespace
/home/audun/git/my-role/tasks/main.yml:2

[ANSIBLE0002] Trailing whitespace
/home/audun/git/my-role/tasks/main.yml:3
- debug: msg="Hello World"

The investigation

I had a suspicion there might be hidden characters in the file, but before running it through a HEX editor, I tried to check it with the Linux file command:


(vansible23)[audun@hostname my-role]$ file /home/audun/git/my-role/tasks/main.yml
/home/audun/git/my-role/tasks/main.yml: ASCII text, with CRLF line terminators


As shown above, it turned out that the file had CRLF line terminators on every line, indicating that this file had been created on Windows. That was luckily easy to fix.

The solution

The dos2unix command was used to change the file to Unix format:


(vansible23)[audun@hostname my-role]$ dos2unix /home/audun/git/my-role/tasks/main.yml
dos2unix: converting file /home/audun/git/my-role/tasks/main.yml to Unix format ...


Afterwards ansible-lint reported no issues:


(vansible23)[audun@hostname my-role]$ ansible-lint .