Using virtualenv Python in local Ansible

I've been playing with Ansible's module for DigitalOcean as I work toward moving my site off the creaky old shared hosting and into The Future™. I hope to have a more in-detailed writeup of that whole process later, but right now I have it working rather nicely with a shared playbook and roles that let me spin up my entire system either on DigitalOcean or in Vagrant.

One catch was getting local Ansible (since the digital_ocean action runs on the local system) to work with the virtualenv I'm developing in. Ansible prefers to run actions using a specific Python—it defaults to /usr/bin/python—and on my MacBook that is the system Python, which is frankly best left alone. I'm not only using a Python built with Homebrew, but I'm also isolating the whole project in a virtualenv because it's bad system management practice to globally install Python bits that I'm using just for one project. I do need one bit in particular to use the DigitalOcean module: dopy. And using virtualenv makes it far easier to capture requirements for my deployment project.

After reading about the plights of a number of people in similar jams, I found ansible_python_interpreter. This setting allows you to specify the path of the Python interpreter Ansible will use to run actions. I wasn't totally sure I could use it, though, because who knows where my virtualenvs would be checked out? It would never point to the right python binary.

The solution turned out to be mind-bogglingly simple. My local inventory:

[localhost]
localhost ansible_python_interpreter=python

Run this way:

ansible-playbook -i inventory digital_ocean.yml

When Ansible now executes python instead of /usr/bin/python, since it's just running it in a subshell, it'll use the activated virtualenv python binary instead, just as if you had run python yourself directly from the shell.

Can't believe I banged my head against the wall for a half hour on this.