An old documented way of preventing services from starting immediately after installation in Debian/Ubuntu is using the RUNLEVEL environment variable to trick the runlevel helper into returning a response that the system isn't fully running, such as:

# RUNLEVEL=1 apt-get install nginx

Sadly this doesn't work in newer versions …

Vagrant is a great tool for creating development environments and testing deployment scripts, especially with Ansible. Testing an Ansible playbook is can be as simple as vagrant up.