When writing Ansible playbooks, it makes sense to test them on vanilla systems. This way you can ensure that what you wrote actually works and you do not forget any prerequisites your playbook requires. A testing environment can be set up with Vagrant easily, as described in the following post.1

By default Vagrant uses virtualbox as its default provider. Perhaps you would like to use a different provider. In this case define your provider with the environment variable DEFAULT_VAGRANT_PROVIDER. E.g., on Windows it makes sense to use Hyper-V (hyperv) instead of VirtualBox since they do not work next to each other.

In the following, we configure a simple Debian host.

Vagrant.configure(2) do |config|
    config.vm.box: "generic/debian9"
end

We then download Ansible's Vagrant Dynamic Inventory to configure Ansible hosts through the Vagrantfile listed above automatically.

# wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ansible/ansible/devel/contrib/inventory/vagrant.py
# chmod +x vagrant.py

To list all available machines run by Vagrant you use ./vagrant.py --list all. As you will see in the output, these machines are grouped under "vagrant". Thus, provided a playbook file that sets "vagrant" as its host, you can test your playbook with

# ansible-playbook -i ./vagrant.py playbook-to-test.yml