ansible-test

October 2020 Update: This post still contains relevant information, but one update: the community.kubernetes collection is moving to kubernetes.core. Otherwise everything's the same, it's just changing names.

The Ansible community has long been a victim of its own success. Since I got started with Ansible in 2013, the growth in the number of Ansible modules and plugins has been astronomical. That's what happens when you build a very simple but powerful tool—easy enough for anyone to extend into any automation use case.

Note: Ansible Collections are currently in tech preview. The details of this blog post may be outdated by the time you read this, though I will try to keep things updated if possible.

Ansible 2.8 and 2.9 introduced a new type of Ansible content, a 'Collection'. Collections are still in tech preview state, so things are prone to change.

Ansible Collections must be in a very specific path, like {...}/ansible_collections/{namespace}/{collection}/

You have to make sure your collection is in that specific path—with an empty directory named ansible_collections, then a directory for the namespace, and finally a directory for the collection itself. I opened an issue in the Ansible issue queue asking if ansible-test can allow running tests in an arbitrary collection directory, and for Molecule itself, there's more of a 'meta' issue, Molecule and Ansible Collections.

Note: Ansible Collections are currently in tech preview. The details of this blog post may be outdated by the time you read this, though I will try to keep things updated if possible.

Ansible 2.8 and 2.9 introduced a new type of Ansible content, a 'Collection'. Collections are still in tech preview state, so things are prone to change, but one thing that the Ansible team has been working on is improving ansible-test to be able to test modules, plugins, and roles in Collections (previously it was only used for testing Ansible core).

ansible-test currently requires your Collection be in a very specific path, either: