Hi everyone,
Yesterday was a busy merge day, and we’re not done. Since I’ve last posted an update, Several dozens of bugfixes and module parameter additions have been added. These include understanding/optimization for hashed known host files (common now on Debian), and various upgrades to the git and hg modules. We’re also in the process of standardizing parameters to the ec2 modules so the arguments are more consistent (keeping old arguments as aliases).
Currently Ansible 1.3 is up to 15 new modules, with recent additions for adding events to boundary, a module for managing RPM keys, and a module for working with DnsMadeEasy
Extra variables (-e) on an Ansible playbook run can now be sourced from a file with “-e @input.json”. (Note: doesn’t support YAML yet, seems logical? Patches welcome!). This is cool to see and I can see a lot of people using this.
There’s also the inventory script performance enhancement feature I just posted about – inventory scripts need to be updated to make use of it but it makes them a lot more zippy.
To see all what has been going on in the development branch see:
https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/devel/CHANGELOG.md
To see some of the features/fixes currently at the top of my list to get into 1.3
https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues?labels=priority&state=open
1.3 is easy to try out now. If you are not yet running the development branch and what to try it out, we make that very easy.
Just do a git checkout:
git clone https://github.com/ansible/ansible.git
cd ansible
source ./hacking/env-setup
You are now running out of checkout, using all the latest modules, with nothing new to install.
I am currently targeting Ansible 1.3 being released at the end of this month. About a week before we’ll have a feature freeze where we’ll take most bugfixes in, but will stop merging feature requests, to encourage testing on a mostly stable code base. Thankfully, we have thousands of people running the development branch all the time, so this is a pretty easy thing to do!
The module library is pretty strong, so if folks are looking for things to do, I’d say “fixing open bug tickets in github” is a good place to start as there are some easy items in there. 1.2 brought in a lot of major features, so 1.3 is going to be a lot more of a refinement release.
Thanks to everyone who has added code, docs, or ideas to 1.3 so far and look for even more shiny things before we’re all done!