When developing an Event-Driven Ansible rulebook to automate tasks like handling a server outage or responding to a failed CI/CD job, testing the logic can be tricky if we don’t have a live system constantly generating events. That’s where the ansible.eda.generic source plugin comes in handy. It allows us to define mock events and inject them directly into the EDA workflow. This makes it easy to simulate real-time scenarios, test the rule conditions, and ensure the playbooks run as expected in a safe and controlled environment. 

In this article, I’ll walk you through how to include payloads directly within an Ansible EDA rulebook, as well as how to read payloads from an external file and use that data in rule conditions. I’ll also include some of the parameters like loop_count and loop_delay, which will help to control the number of times an event is triggered and the delay between each trigger. These features are especially helpful for simulating and managing event flow effectively during testing and development.