Getting a Shippable error importing importing an existing module into a new module.

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1

Hi there,

I’m working on a new module (cloudfront_distribution) and have started getting an error in the past week with Shippable failing.

The error is shown below:

The test ansible-test sanity --test import --python 3.6 failed with the following error:

lib/ansible/modules/cloud/amazon/cloudfront_distribution.py:539:0: ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'ansible.modules'

The error is occurring because I am importing another module (cloudfront_facts) into this module, specifically the line:

from ansible.modules.cloud.amazon.cloudfront_facts import CloudFrontFactsServiceManager

I could copy all the methods from cloudfront_facts into the cloudfront_distribution module, but my concern with this is twofold:

  • There are 18 calls to cloudfront_facts from cloudfront_distribution - albeit some calls are to the same functions, but this is still a significant amount of code to be copying verbatim into a second module.
  • Adding the duplicate code would also lead to unnecessary code bloat and maintenance, and goes against the DRY coding principle (Don’t Repeat Yourself).

I was wondering if there is a way to prevent this Shippable error without duplicating the code between modules. Is there possibly a file the module can be added to to skip this Shippable test?

There is probably a perfectly valid reason for this test to fail (such as preventing dependency chains) and there may be another alternative, (like placing the common code into module_utils/aws or module_utils/facts), but thought I’d open it up for discussion on the best way to approach/fix this.

Thanks,
Will

2

For cases like this, the current approach is to move shared code into a ansible.module_utils module and update cloudfront_facts and cloudfront_distribution

to use the new module_utils.

Importing ‘from ansible.modules.other_module’ from my_module isnt recommended, since ‘other_module’ wont be available when my_module is invoked

remotely. The runtime python path for the remote module more or less only has my_module and ansible.module_utils available to it.