sshnaidm gave me an opportunity to play with Ansible Collections today.

Since I was at AnsibleFest 2019 in Atlanta, I heard so much about the collections but never actually used them.

The first steps were really tough: I had no idea how to even start reviewing the PR and using it locally.

Luckily, Ansible has solid docs; these two were an immense help to me:

1. Using collections
2. Developing collections

TL;DR

• ansible-galaxy collection * is the CLI interface

• all I did was to clone the repository and ran:

  $ ansible-galaxy collection build
  $ ansible-galaxy collection install containers-podman-0.2.0.tar.gz
  

• apparently ansible-galaxy just puts files and directories into a hierarchy:

  • ~/.ansible/collections/ansible_collections/containers/podman

    • containers is a namespace
    • podman is the name of the collection

• you should be able to clone the repo in there directly (as README of the collection suggests)

How did I review?

Well, I just used the buildah connection plugin from the collection:

---
- name: Test out the PR
  hosts: all
  connection: containers.podman.buildah
  vars: ...

But before running ansible-playbook, we need to create a buildah container:

$ buildah from fedora:32
fedora-working-container

And we also need to invoke ansible-playbook using buildah unshare so the mount command would work. Here we go:

$ buildah unshare ansible-playbook -i fedora-working-container, ./simple-playbook.yaml

PLAY [Test out the PR] ***************************************************************

TASK [Gathering Facts] ***************************************************************
ok: [fedora-working-container]

TASK [Run a sample command] **********************************************************
changed: [fedora-working-container]

PLAY RECAP ***************************************************************************
fedora-working-container   : ok=2    changed=1    unreachable=0    failed=0    skipped=0    rescued=0    ignored=0

That’s it, all good.