ansible galaxy

Ansible Galaxy was recently updated to the 'Next Generation' (Galaxy-NG) codebase.

There are some growing pains, as a lot of Galaxy NG was built up around Collections, and Ansible role support was written into the codebase over the past year or so, after it became obvious Galaxy roles would not be deprecated.

Unfortunately, one of the major issues right now—which I'm seeing pop up in many places—is an error that occurs upon installation of Galaxy roles for any playbook (e.g. when you run ansible-galaxy install to download a role), for any role that has had a new version released in the past few weeks.

You wind up with an error like:

Note for Tower/AWX users: Currently, Tower requires role and collection requirements to be split out into different files; see Tower: Ansible Galaxy Support. Hopefully Tower will be able to support the requirements layout I outline in this post soon!

Since collections will be a major new part of every Ansible user's experience in the coming months, I thought I'd write a little about what I consider an Ansible best practice: that is, always using project-relative collection and role paths, so you can have multiple independent Ansible projects that track their own dependencies according to the needs of the project.

Early on in my Ansible usage, I would use a global roles path, and install all the roles I used (whether private or on Ansible Galaxy) into that path, and I would rarely have a playbook or project-specific role or use a different playbook-local version of the role.

I maintain a large number of Ansible Galaxy roles, and publish hundreds of new releases every year. If the process weren't fully automated, there would be no way I could keep up with it. For Galaxy roles, the process of tagging and publishing a new release is very simple, because Ansible Galaxy ties the role strongly to GitHub's release system. All that's needed is a webhook in your .travis.yml file (if using Travis CI):

For collections, Ansible Galaxy actually hosts an artifact—a .tar.gz file containing the collection contents. This offers some benefits that I won't get into here, but also a challenge: someone has to build and upload that artifact... and that takes more than one or two lines added to a .travis.yml file.

Until recently, I had been publishing collection releases manually. The process went something like:

Every successful software project I've worked on reaches a point where architectural changes need to be made to ensure the project's continued success. I've been involved in the Drupal community for over a decade, and have written about the successes and failures resulting from a major rearchitecture in version 8. Apple's Macintosh OS had two major failed rewrites which were ultimately scrapped as Apple moved on to Mac OS X.

It's a common theme, and because change is hard, the first response to a major shift in a software project is often negative. Distrust over the project's stewards, or anger about a voice not being heard are two common themes. Even though it has nothing to do with the change (which was being discussed 3 years ago), the acquisition of Red Hat by IBM last year didn't do anything to assuage conspiracy theorists!

The following is a transcript of the content in my AnsibleFest Atlanta 2019 session, There's a role for that! How to evaluate community roles for your playbooks.

• Presentation slides
• Presentation video

Introduction

I'm Jeff Geerling, I wrote a book on Ansible (Ansible for DevOps), I have used Ansible on an almost daily basis for hundreds of different projects since 2013, and I now work with Red Hat's Ansible team as a technical contractor.

Some people wonder ask how teams can be productive while maintaining many applications on a variety of cloud providers. One of the key reasons is reliance on Ansible content contributed and maintained by others.

Last night I presented the following slides at the Ansible St. Louis meetup at Riot Games. In the presentation, I mention the motivation behind Ansible and Galaxy 2, and run through most of the major changes and new features:

I've incorporated many of the new features in Ansible 2.0 in my book, Ansible for DevOps, and will be rewriting a few of the examples in the book to take advantage of new features in Ansible 2 soon!