How to setup Ansible Collection

index.md

How to setup Ansible Collection

I hope to collect bits and pieces on how to setup Ansible Collection project for local development and testing with Molecule.

Structure

• ~/code/github.com/user/namespace/
  • .skeleton/
  • collection-a/
  • collection-b/
    • collections/
    • environments/
      • development/
      • production/
        • .ssh/
        • group_vars/
        • host_vars/
        • hosts
    • molecule/
      • role-a/
      • role-b/
    • playbooks/
    • plugins/
    • roles/
      • role-a/
      • role-b/
    • scripts/

Molecule

Molecule and role meta dependency discovery

There are 3 ways how to handle role meta dependencies:

• Publish collection to Ansible Galaxy
• Push collection to the remote Git repository
• Use local collections

Local collections

This means that all dependencies are available locally and Molecule does not need to ping the Web. To make this working there are few requirements:

• All dependencies should be cloned into ~/code/github.com/user/ansible/collection-b/collections/ansible_collections/collection-name This should be done even for the collection or roles which are part of the collection-a or collection-b if there are roles which deppends on each other. But inter-role dependencies is considered as a bad practice and the playbooks should be used to glue several roles together. You can use ln -s $PWD/roles $PWD/collections/ansible_collections/namespace/collection-b/roles to create the symlinks to the actual roles. Or you can just copy them, but that will lead to the confussion when you will forget to update those.

• molecule.yaml#provisioner:env:ANSIBLE_COLLECTION_PATH: "./collections" should be set.

  I believe you could also create symlink from ~/code/github.com/user/namespace/ to ~/.ansible/collections/ansible_collections/namespace and in this case I think you can omit the ANSIBLE_COLLECTION_PATH variable. I should check that. https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/devel/dev_guide/developing_collections_contributing.html#hacking-collections

Since I wrote this, I do things bit differently. All my collections are just part of single "ansible" Git repository under ./collections/ansible_collections directory.