Having trouble choosing which namespace to upload my ansible roles to

Get Help
1

Yes, I am having trouble choosing which namespace to upload my ansible roles to.

For example, my ansible role https://github.com/roles-ansible/ansible_role_test.git is available in https://galaxy.ansible.com/ui/standalone/roles/roles-ansible/test/ and https://galaxy.ansible.com/ui/standalone/roles/l3d/test/.
I want to use it as ansible role l3d.test, so I add “namespace: l3d” to the meta/main.yml, see https://github.com/roles-ansible/ansible_role_test/blob/main/meta/main.yml#L5.

But the galaxy role import tool only imports it into roles-ansible.test. Not only is that a namespace I don’t want to use for it, it’s also a namespace with a “-” in the name. And stuff like that has had weird effects on ansible lately.

I miss the ability to delete or at least archive roles that are no longer updated. And I miss the ability to choose the namespace I want to use.
I miss the ability to add a custom profile picture to namespaces. Especially when I don’t have control over the github user with the name of my namespace.

Which brings me to my roadmap question. Is there any thought of taking back control of ansible roles and ansible role namespaces? Is there a bigger idea of how Galaxy should look for ansible roles in the future and I am just too impatient?

Because instead of trying to get my ansible roles to work, I could say screw all the ansible roles on galaxy-ng, I will just upload ansible collections. And putting ansible roles into ansible collections is a bit of work, but absolutely possible. I did just that with my l3d.test role using the l3d.testing collection, see:

Github: https://github.com/roles-ansible/ansible_collection_test.git
Galacy collection: https://galaxy.ansible.com/ui/repo/published/l3d/testing/
Ansible role l3d.test in the l3d.testing collection: https://galaxy.ansible.com/ui/repo/published/l3d/testing/content/role/test/

It depends a bit on what happened to the Ansible roles. They are now labelled as legacy. Will they be deleted in galaxy-ng one day? Is it worth spending time and energy on them?

Thank you for reading this post. I love ansible and open source and would like to share my ansible roles and collections. And I hope that sharing ansible roles via galaxy-ng will soon be fun again.

And sorry for putting the links as a code block, the last time I put them as links the anti-spam bot was very trigger-happy.

1 Like
2

Moving to a new topic at @tannerjc’s request.

You are Trust Level 1 now which means most spam stuff no longer applies to you. Links to GitHub are exempt from the checker anyway, I’ll double check about galaxy (and add it, if not)

Edit: it wasn’t, I’ve added it now

1 Like
3

We don’t have any plans to delete roles. At a certain point, we were considering deprecation in favor of collections, which is probably why you see some sort of “legacy” text somewhere, but it’s clear roles are important to many in the community based on the feedback we’ve gotten here and during our beta period, so we pivoted to making sure they were kept, and are working on improvements to searching and filtering for them because that has been a big ask here on the forum. References to “legacy” roles are probably just clean-up that got missed.

3 Likes
4

There isn’t a button in the UI for deleting roles yet, but there is a way to do it via the API. I’ve covered this in more than 1 post so far, so I’m adding it to the docs via this PR

2 Likes