Recent Highlights for Ansible Development Tools

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Recent Highlights for Ansible Development Tools

This has been an eventful year for Ansible development tools (ADT). Releases over the past months have brought enhancements, bugfixes, streamlined development workflows, and improved compatibility across the entire toolchain, as well as some awesome community contributions!

Highlights:

  • ansible-dev-environment (ade): Now recommended as the standard for managing Ansible project virtual environments and for installing Ansible and Python collection dependencies in complex inter-dependency environments. ADE now defaults to creating project-specific environments to avoid conflicts with other collection paths and existing installs.
  • ansible-creator: Enhanced theAdd subcommand functionality for adding roles, devfiles, devcontainers, and plugins. Also added full scaffolding support for execution environment projects. This streamlines the process of extending Ansible projects, providing base structures for starting development.
  • ansible-navigator: Implemented Ansible and ADT compatibility improvements, ensuring smoother integration across the development toolchain.
  • ansible-lint: Added enhanced data tagging features for compatibility with ansible-core 2.19, improved virtual environment detection, and streamlined tool usage capabilities. We have had some fantastic contributions from the Ansible community to lint in the past months. Check out the release notes here for details!
  • community-ansible-dev-tools container: Now includes ansible-core 2.19, providing developers with the latest core functionality and improvements in a containerized environment.
  • Molecule: Went through a large modernization effort with substantial updates and improvements. For detailed information about these changes, see the section below.
  • VS Code Ansible Extension: Surfaced additional ADT features via UI, providing ansible-creator functionality directly through form webviews. See the dedicated VS Code section below for more details.

Ansible Molecule’s Modernization Journey

The Ansible DevTools team has put a thorough effort in 2025 towards modernizing Molecule as a robust testing tool for both roles and collections. This month, the team released Molecule v25.9.0.rc1 for community testing before general availability. This pre-release includes significant improvements to make Molecule more intuitive and Ansible-native, building on top of a months-long effort on tech debt and functionality cleanup.

Release Notes: v25.9.0.rc1

Highlights:

  • Ansible-Native workflows with centralized Ansible configuration, collection-aware scenario discovery, and custom create/destroy support;
  • Enhanced reporting and output with summary readability improvements;
  • Extensive documentation updates around collection-aware changes;
  • New shared_state configuration option for multi-step testing;
  • Driver & reliability updates with KubeVirt driver support, updated Podman examples, and improved error handling;

We welcome all feedback, bug reports, recommendations, and contributions!

Ansible VS Code Extension - New UI Integrations

The Ansible Devtools team wants to highlight recent changes to the Ansible VS Code extension. Releases over the past year focus on improving the user experience with significant UI enhancements and expanded integrations with ansible-creator.

Highlights:

  • UI Improvements: The extension activity sidebar now features a convenient “quick links” view that provides instant access to ansible-creator forms, settings, and documentation, making essential tools just one click away.
  • New Form Options for ansible-creator: New comprehensive creation forms have been built specifically for scaffolding execution environment projects, adding roles, devfiles, and devcontainer files, giving you more flexibility and options when setting up your Ansible projects. These options are surfaced on the quick links sidebar for easy access.
  • Build execution environments via the UI: Within the execution environment project form, users can now select build options to immediately scaffold definition files, create context, and build EEs with ansible-builder.
  • Ansible Lightspeed Role Generation Features: The extension now offers role generation capabilities powered by Ansible Lightspeed, enabling AI-assisted development workflows for faster and more efficient role creation.
  • Lightspeed Login Improvements: We heard your feedback! Users are no longer prompted to log in after turning off Ansible Lightspeed, providing a smoother experience for those who prefer to work without the AI-powered features.
  • Welcome Page Updates: The Getting Started page has been refreshed with interactive walkthroughs now surfaced directly on the page, making it easier for new users to get started with the extension and development tools quickly.

Download the extension here and get started with our readthedocs documentation here.

The Ansible Devtools team would love to hear your thoughts on all these recent updates. See all our projects here.

Thank you all for continued contributions and input into Ansible’s development tools!

– alison & the Ansible devtools team

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