This week in Ansible Community
Issue #116, 2023-09-16 (Past Issues)
Welcome to The Bullhorn, our newsletter for the Ansible Community. If you have any questions or content you’d like to share, you’re welcome to chat with us in the Ansible Social room on Matrix, and mention newsbot to have your news item tagged for review for the next weekly issue!
KEY DATES 
cybette shared
- 2023-09-18: ansible-core feature freeze, stable-2.16 branch created
- 2023-09-19: DaWGs meeting, 15:00 UTC
- 2023-09-20: Ansible Community Day, Berlin 2023
- 2023-09-20: Community WG meeting, 18:00 UTC (propose topics here)
- 2023-09-21: Bullhorn #117 content deadline, 18:00 UTC
- 2023-09-26: Ansible-9.0.0 alpha1
- 2023-10-09: ETA for Ansible-Core 2.14.11 and 2.15.5
- 2023-10-10: ETA for Ansible 8.5.0 release
- 2023-10-19: Ansible Contributor Summit 2023.10
GENERAL NEWS UPDATES 
Gwmngilfen said
Community Forum launch update
In case you hadn’t heard, we have a forum! Please check it out if you haven’t yet
You probably have heard though - the launch has been quite impressive to watch. We’ve had over 300 signups this week alone! In the 4 days since the blog post went live, we’ve had 50+ new topics and almost 300 posts (that’s roughly 500% more than
ansible-project’s traffic this week), got 17,000 pageviews (around 1/3 of our Reddit traffic!), and users have given out nearly 700 likes. OK, some of that was me, but that’s still up ~120% compared to our X/Twitter account this week (and over 100 of those Twitter engagements was the tweet announcing the forum in the first place)!Now clearly some of that is launch-new-shiny-thing effect, and we’ll be monitoring these stats in the coming weeks - but I think you have to conclude that this is a desired platform. That’s supported by some of the comments we’ve seen from around the web:
- @fedora noticed us!
- @geerlingguy likes it
- Nice blog post here from @grifferz (also a great post on Mutt configuration!)
- We even made the top news spot inside Red Hat too!
Let us know what other posts you find - but I think we’ve touched a nerve here folks! I’m super excited about where we can take this, and we’re already working with some of the teams to get them set up with a forum-based workflow.
More to come, stay tuned!
cybette shared
Ansible Community Day, Berlin 2023
Here’s the agenda for Ansible Community Day on Sept 20 (next Wednesday), and here’s your last chance to register! See you in Berlin!
MAJOR NEW RELEASES 
Ansible-Core 
The ansible-core package contains the base engine and a small subset of modules and plugins. To see what’s planned for the next release, look at the ansible-core roadmaps.
cybette contributed
Ansible 
The Ansible package includes ansible-core and is a batteries-included package that provides a curated set of Ansible collections. See the Ansible roadmaps for future release plans.
anwesha contributed
You can install it by running the following command or download the release tarball directly from pypi:
python3 -m pip install ansible==8.4.0 --user
Check Release Notes:package:
and Ansible 8 Porting Guide for more details!
AWX Project
AWX provides a web-based user interface, REST API, and task engine built on top of Ansible.
thedoubl3j contributed
We’re happy to announce that the next release of AWX, version 23.1.0 is now available!
Some notable features include:
- HostMetrics: Hard auto-cleanup
- Allow saml_admin_attr to work in conjunction with SAML Org Map
- Create AWX docsite with RST content
- Added relnotes for 23.0.0
In addition AWX Operator version 2.5.3 has also been released!
Please see the releases pages for more details: AWX, Operator.
DevTools 
Projects to make it easier to write and test Ansible Content. Includes VScode extension, language server, ansible-lint, molecule, ansible-navigator and potentially other development goodies. To see what’s planned, and how you can help checkout the foundation-devtools project board
Cristiano Nicolai contributed
Ansible Lint v6.19.0 has been released with minor updates, including auto-fixes for no-log-password, key-order[task], deprecated-local-action and jinja[spacing] rules as well as several bug fixes.
PROJECT UPDATES 
dmsimard shared
ARA Records Ansible 1.7.0 has been released! For more information about this new release, check out the highlights on the project blog.
This new version features a refresh of the built-in web interface including an update of Bootstrap from 4.6.0 to 5.3.0. It lifts the supported version of Django up to the latest LTS, 4.2, and raises the minimum version of Python to >=3.8 as a result. There’s also bug fixes and new features.
The blog post highlights some of the changes since ara 1.6.1 but for the full list, see:
- the changelog on GitHub
- the list of commits since 1.6.1
You can also catch up on the changelog and release notes for every version until now in the documentation. Enjoy !
COLLECTION UPDATES 
Felix Fontein said
community.general 8.0.0 will drop support for ansible-core 2.11 and ansible-core 2.12. In general, from now on, every new release of community.general will drop support for all ansible-core versions that have been End of Life for at least a few weeks before the release date. This has been decided in a community vote.
Felix Fontein said
community.general 7.4.0 and community.general 6.6.5 have been released with new bugfixes, features, and modules. The next expected 7.x.y release will be 7.5.0 roughly on October 9th, and that will be the last minor 7.x.0 release. The release of community.general 8.0.0 will likely happen in the week before November 6th, Ansible 9’s feature freeze date.
Sean Sullivan contributed
infra.ah_configuration 2.0.3 has been released. This Ansible collection allows for easy interaction with Galaxy NG or Ansible Automation Hub via Ansible modules and roles.
Visit the repo for more information and updates.
COMMUNITY UPDATES 
Gwmngilfen contributed
(Forum) User of the Week!
One of the things we get from a new platform is new tooling, and in particular Discourse helps us to recognise the often unsung work done by our community in supporting each other, giving answers, and participating in discussions.
So, we’d like to try out a “User of the Week” badge, based on forum activity (I don’t want to devalue code or GitHub, far from it, but those things are well measured already!). Details of how it’s measured and who is eligible (i.e. people who haven’t got it yet) are on the forum.
This week, it’s Sean Sullivan! Thanks for your help getting us up and running in launch week Sean!
THAT’S ALL FOR NOW!
Have any questions you’d like to ask, or issues you’d like to see covered? Please ask in #social:ansible.com! See you next time!