Migrating tower_* modules to from tower-cli to awxkit

Hi everybody,

I’m currently trying to get the tower_* modules in the awx collection running on a RHEL8. My problem is, there is no tower-cli RPM package for RHEL8 / Centos 8 around, so the only way to install tower-cli is using pip. In locked down environments that is not the best option to go IMHO. Since according to [1] tower-cli is no longer supported, I was wondering whether it would make sense to migrate the tower_* modules to the more modern awxkit [2] library. I could start looking into this, but I wanted to check with you guys what you think about this.

Any thoughts?

–Juerg

[1] https://github.com/ansible/tower-cli
[2] https://github.com/ansible/awx/tree/devel/awxkit/awxkit

Please see https://github.com/ansible/awx/issues/5145 … there is ongoing work related to this. I know some modules remain to be done.

Thanks Elijah for the link, I’ll see what can be done.

–Juerg

tower-cli is deprecated (https://github.com/ansible/tower-cli) so this is currently very messy because awx-cli isn’t yet as fully developed as tower-cli was.

-JP

Simultaneously right now, some awx-cli features are being built out, and the AWX collection is being converted to remove the old tower-cli dependency.
if you want to use the tower_* modules and you are on Ansible 2.9, you should install the collection and include it in your playbook. You can get the collection from Galaxy:

https://galaxy.ansible.com/awx/awx

The 9.2.0 version still requires the old tower-cli for all modules, but if you install from our devel branch, some will not, because that very recently merged.
Eventually, they will all either have no python dependency, or will depend on the new awx-cli.

The modules in the collection are much better maintained than they were in Ansible core, with good testing, and still keep backward compatibility. We would love to get more feedback on them.