Ansible Collections: init
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.
…Ansible-bender reaches 0.5.0
Exciting times! I just released ansible-bender-0.5.0.
This update contains a ton of new stuff. There is the one feature I am very proud of — configuring the build process by using Ansible variables. Apart from that, I did a lot of bug fixes and usability improvements.
…Ansible Bender in OKD #2
tl;dr
PoC Definition: Can ansible-bender run inside an OpenShift origin pod?
Answer: Yes!
Ansible-bender in OKD
Intro
For the past couple of months, I’ve been working on a project we call “Ansible OCI image builder”. I named the tool itself ansible-bender (and yes, it’s shiny).
…Road to ansible-bender 0.2.0
I’m pleased to announce that
ansible-bender is now
available in version 0.2.0.
Ansible and Podman Can Play Together Now
Sam Doran just merged my pull request which introduces a new connection plugin for podman. If you are not sure what an Ansible connection plugin is, hold tight and I’ll show you.
The connection plugin is the component which enables Ansible to execute commands in a target environment: you are probably mostly familiar with these two:
- ssh — managing remote machines
- local — executing a playbook in the current environment
Since Ansible abstracts this mechanic very well, you can easily write connection plugins for such a thing as container managers. Ansible has one for docker and some time ago I wrote one for buildah. I concluded it’s time to write it for podman as well, finally (so I can utilize it in ansible-bender).
…Caching mechanism in ansible-bender
A few weeks ago I announced a new project — ansible-bender (ab). It’s a simple tool to create container images using Ansible playbooks. The same concept as ansible-container, but ab is only about builds.
Ansible-bender utilizes an ansible connection plugin to invoke a playbook in a container and buildah as the container technology.
Recently I was able to land a caching mechanism - every task result is being cached. Since ansible doesn’t allow doing such thing easily, it was quite a feat.
…Building Container Images with Buildah and Ansible
Update: I started a tool which simplifies all of this into a single command: TomasTomecek/ab.
Do you use Ansible roles to provision your infrastructure? And would you like to use those very same roles to create container images? You came to the right place!
We are working on a project (and you problably heard of it already) called Ansible Container. It’s not just about creation of container images. It covers the complete workflow of a containerized application. From build, local run, test to deploy.
In this blog post, I would like to show you how Ansible Container does those builds — from an Ansible role to a container image.
…Ansible Container usage
Greg told me at AnsibleFest that we don’t know how many users Ansible Container has. PyPI no longer directly provides information about downloads. Except… I recently stumbled upon this blog post which talks about getting download stats for PyPI packages using Google BigQuery. So let’s do that!
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