At the end of last year the Ansible community team at Red Hat set up an ecosystem page on the docsite to bring together all the projects that you can use to expand automation.
The idea was to bring everything together into a central landing page where you can access project docs. And it seemed to work nicely. However, over the course of the past few months, we’ve also noticed an issue with difficulty finding a home for cross-project documentation.
For instance, the Getting started with execution environments guide is currently on the devel branch of the package docs. That is a good place for visibility and it definitely fits a community need but it pushes the scope of what the package docs are intended for (namely what you get when you pip install ansible) because it touches projects like Ansible Runner and Ansible Navigator.
So we’ve taken things a step further by building a complete docsite for cross-project use cases and we’re calling it “Ansible ecosystem documentation”. You can check it out here: Ansible ecosystem documentation
You might notice that we’ve reproduced the ecosystem.html page too. (Note that there is an issue with the template for that page and you might need to refresh to load the two column layout. Any help with the issue is appreciated.)
What next, you ask? Let’s document all the things.
If you have ideas for cross-project How To guides or tutorials, let us know. You can reply here with ideas or create an issue in the repository. Better yet, fork ecosystem-documentation and contribute your content.
Thanks! We look forward to hearing from you and hope you find this a step in the right direction.
I must point out that these projects are in some shape or form part of Ansible products sold by Red Hat and that in my opinion the ecosystem does not stop there.
@rfc2549 I love this idea, we should absolutely include other projects. I think the Ecosystem page is a great place for anything “in Ansible’s orbit” so to speak.
@rfc2549 I absolutely agree that the ecosystem does not stop at projects that Red Hat supports directly. And I’m glad you pointed this out! While I do not personally know if there is an actual plan to include other projects on the ecosystem page, I see no reason not to do that. If you would like, feel free to open an issue or just send a PR to include those projects. (I’m happy to do that myself but it might be early next week before I can get to it.)
One point that this suggestion raises for me - and this applies to all projects - is some kind of governance around inclusion to the ecosystem. For instance we recently removed Pinakes from the docs.ansible.com/ecosystem.html page because the project hasn’t been actively contributed to in several months.
At some point soon we’ll need to dig in and define some of those criteria and things (with help from the steering committee). But the point there is more about having some consistent requirements for projects - things like licensing and clear contributor guidelines matter. It’s not about gatekeeping or anything like that.
Over the years I’ve seen various discussions along the same lines for awesome-ansible, that “Other Tools and Programs” page and other things like which distribution or package manager should be featured in the “how to install Ansible” docs.
I don’t have bandwidth to tackle that right now but recognize the challenge in defining what should or shouldn’t be in there. It’s not simple: it’s complicated
@rfc2549 I hear you. We (community team) talked about this a few days ago. It’s still a little strange because I feel like this is something that really should be simple. What are those criteria for projects need to meet - or as @gwmngilfen says - what are the table stakes? It’s probably going to take a lot of discussion and some tricky navigation to get us there but - rest assured - there is no gatekeeping of the ecosystem by Red Hat. And I think there are a lot of lessons learned from things like collection inclusion guidelines that we can reference for the ecosystem.
