The Bullhorn

A Newsletter for the Ansible Developer Community

Welcome to The Bullhorn, our newsletter for the Ansible developer community. If you have any questions or content you’d like to share, please reach out to us at the-bullhorn@redhat.com.

ANSIBLE-BASE 2.10 BETA 1 RELEASED

On June 17th, the Ansible Core team released the first beta of ansible-base-2.10.

The ansible-base package consists of only the Ansible execution engine, related tools (e.g. ansible-galaxy, ansible-test), and a very small set of built-in plugins; the remaining content has been moved into Ansible collections, which can now be installed separately. For more details on what’s new, installation instructions, and a link to the full changelog, read Matt Davis’s announcement to the ansible-devel mailing list.

ANSIBLE-2.10 ALPHA 1 RELEASED

On June 18th, the Ansible Community team released the first alpha of ansible-2.10. This Ansible package is comparable with, and intended to be a drop-in replacement for, previous versions of Ansible; collections with all previously available modules have been reintegrated into this package. For more details on installation instructions, known issues, and upcoming release plans, read Toshio Kuratomi’s announcement to the ansible-devel mailing list.

NEW ANSIBLE CONTENT COLLECTIONS RELEASED

The initial release of Red Hat-maintained Ansible Content Collections have been published to Automation Hub for automating select platforms from Arista, AWS, Cisco, IBM, Juniper, Splunk and more. Community versions are also available from Ansible Galaxy. For more information, read Andrius Benokraitis’s blog post on ansible.com.

NEW ANSIBLE COMMUNITY COLLECTIONS RELEASED

Two key Ansible community collections, community.general and community.network, reached 0.2.0 last week, which is an important milestone in their development. See https://github.com/ansible-collections/community.general/issues/507 and https://github.com/ansible-collections/community.network/issues/64 for more information on their release cycles.

REMINDER: VIRTUAL ANSIBLE CONTRIBUTOR SUMMIT

The next Ansible Contributor Summit is less than two weeks away! It’s scheduled for Monday, July 6th, with hackathon days to follow on the 7th and 8th. Please register on Eventbrite if you plan to attend any part of the event.

For the agenda, check out the “Potential Topics” section on the etherpad, add topics you’d like to see discussed or vote on existing topics.

COMMUNITY WORKING GROUP HIGHLIGHTS

The community working group meets on Wednesdays at 18:00 UTC in #ansible-community on Freenode IRC. You can import this URL community.ics to your own calendar if you’d like to receive reminders. To see what's being discussed and add your own topics see the agenda.

One of the aims of the Bullhorn is to keep people informed about important changes to contributors. With the move to a distributed codebase, in the form of collections and their repos, it's even more important that we improve communication. So, we will be including a summary of the recent changes that you as (potential) contributors or collection maintainers should be aware of.

Changes impacting contributors:

As ansible-base 2.10 beta1 has been released, now is the time to ensure that your repos are running ansible-test sanity from the ansible/ansible:stable-2.10 branch. If you don't yet have CI setup you can copy the "Sanity" section from ansible-test GitHub Action example.
Also on the CI front, you should copy tests/sanity/ignore-2.10.txt to tests/sanity/ignore-2.11.txt in preparation for running sanity tests from stable-2.10 and devel branches of ansible-base.
We are happy to announce that the way to define and document deprecations has been agreed on. Ansible-test (included in ansible-base 2.10) has been updated to check these, so you should review and update as needed.
As deprecations are now defined in a collections meta/runtime.yml, ANSIBLE_METADATA is no longer needed, so you can bulk delete this from all modules in your collection, see dropping ANSIBLE_METADATA for details.
To speed up your unit and integration tests you may wish to review the Python dependencies you are pulling in, check out part A and part B for more information.
There is now a process for automatically generating changelogs, for information on how to achieve this check out this guide.

We recommend that you subscribe (with the button on the right hand side) to https://github.com/ansible-collections/overview/issues/45 which is where changes will be announced in advance.

If you need help with any of this, please join us in #ansible-devel on Freenode.

ANSIBLE PULL REQUEST REVIEW DAY

On Wednesday the 17th July we hosted the first "Big PR review day" since the move to collections. It was a good opportunity for people to find out about the collections work and how things are progressing. We had 15 people join in, of which two were brand new contributors to Ansible.

The next PR review day will be in August, subscribe to Big PR Review Day to find out when.

ANSIBLE VIRTUAL MEETUPS

The following virtual meetups are being held in the Ansible community over the next month:

Ansible India Meetup: Ansible 2.10, Collections, and more!
Sat, Jun 27 · 10:00 AM UTC+5:30
RSVP with one of the meetup groups “near” you: Bangalore, Kolkata, Delhi, Mumbai, Aurangabad, Chennai, Hyderabad, or Pune! (They will link to the same virtual event.)

Ansible NOVA: Multicloud Networking leveraging Ansible and Pureport!
Tue, Jun 30 · 4:00 PM EDT
https://www.meetup.com/Ansible-NOVA/events/271232565/

Ansible New Zealand: Ansible for Windows. How, Why and When?
Thu, Jul 9 · 12:00 PM GMT+12
https://www.meetup.com/Ansible-New-Zealand/events/271155213/

Note: For these virtual events, the links to participate will be visible once you RSVP to attend. If you’re interested in the topics presented, you can join from anywhere in the world as long as the time zone and language works for you!

Interested in presenting at an Ansible virtual meetup? Sign up here: https://forms.gle/aG5zpVkXDVMHLERX9

FEEDBACK

Have any questions you’d like to ask, or issues you’d like to see covered? Please send us an email at the-bullhorn@redhat.com.