The Bullhorn #119

News & Announcements Newsletter
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This week in Ansible Community

Issue #119, 2023-10-07 (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 issue!

KEY DATES :stopwatch:

cybette shared

GENERAL NEWS UPDATES :speaker:

cybette said

The Bullhorn editor (yours truly) will be taking some time off this month, and the next 2 issues will be published fortnightly instead of weekly. Issue #120 can be expected on Oct 21, and issue #121 will follow on Nov 3, after which weekly releases will resume.

andersson007_ contributed

Execution environments documentation update

Try Ansible Execution Environments to solve software dependencies, portability, and content separation issues and gain from other benefits of containerization!

The Getting started with Execution Environments guide is now available for you! Many thanks to everyone involved!

The guide shows the power of Ansible control nodes built and run using container technology. It concisely covers the following topics:

  • Introduction to execution environments (technology overview, values it brings)
  • Setting up your environment
  • Building a simple execution environment
  • Running your execution environment
  • Running community execution environments

Please try it out and help improve community experience by sharing your feedback on the Forum, on Matrix in the Community room and/or open an issue/pull request in the ansible-documentation repository!

The community Execution Environment images availability

The community execution environment container images are now available!

They are based on a latest Fedora image and get updated regularly.
There are two editions available at the moment:

  • community-ee-minimal: includes only ansible-core
  • community-ee-base: contains ansible-core and the following collections:
    • ansible.posix
    • ansible.utils
    • ansible.windows

If you want to include other collections or collections of different versions, just build you own custom execution environment.

Unfamiliar with the technology?

Take a look at the Getting started with Execution Environments guide!

How to use the images

The images are available as:

  • ghcr.io/ansible-community/community-ee-minimal:<TAG>
  • ghcr.io/ansible-community/community-ee-base:<TAG>

Try them out in a few easy steps using the new Running Ansible with the community EE image guide.

Feedback

Your feedback is invaluable! Share your ideas or ask for help on the Forum!

andersson007_ shared

The community-ee-minimal version 2.15.4-2 and community-ee-base version 2.15.4-3 execution environment images have been published. They contain necessary system packages missed in the original releases.

Please update your ansible-navigator or AWX/Controller configuration if it uses the images.

Unfamiliar with the technology? See the Getting started with EE guide which contains the Running Ansible with the community EE image manual.

cybette said

Ansible Contributor Summit 2023.10

Join us at Ansible Contributor Summit on October 19, where participants will be able to attend both in-person (in Durham, NC, USA) and online. Please take a look at this forum topic for details on registration, covid-19 policy, how to join online, and more!

MAJOR NEW RELEASES :trophy:

Antsibull :arrow_upper_right:

Tooling for building the Ansible package and collection documentation.

Felix Fontein shared

antsibull-docs 2.5.0 has been released to support the new Ansible Galaxy codebase. The default collection URL template has been changed from https://galaxy.ansible.com/{namespace}/{name} to https://galaxy.ansible.com/ui/repo/published/{namespace}/{name}/. The old URLs will provide a 404 page which searches for collections and roles of the provided name, while the new URLs directly send the user to the collection’s page.

Ansible :arrow_upper_right:

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.

samccann contributed

Ansible 9.0.0 Alpha2 is out! :heart:

:minidisc: You can install it by running the following command or download the release tarball directly from pypi:

$ python3 -m pip install ansible==9.0.0a2 --user

:arrow_right: Check Ansible 9 Porting Guide for more details!

Join the new Ansible Community Forum to follow along and participate in all the release-related discussions and announcements. Feel free to share your thoughts, ideas and concerns in there. Register here to join us!

Ansible-Core :arrow_upper_right:

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

New release beta: ansible-core 2.16.0b2

PROJECT UPDATES :hammer_and_wrench:

andersson007_ shared

Execution Environments Crew

We are happy to announce that the Execution Environments Crew forum group has been created and new members are very welcome!

The initial goal of the group is to help answer technology-related questions and share insights. See the group description for details.

Please join us and help move things forward!

AWX Project :arrow_upper_right:

AWX provides a web-based user interface, REST API, and task engine built on top of Ansible. Join the AWX discussion in the Ansible Community Forum.

gundalow shared

AWX Google Group moving to the Ansible Community Forum

Hi folks,

As you may have heard, Ansible has a new forum and we think that’s a better way to conduct our discussions. It gives better tooling to manage help requests and discussions, connects with the wider Ansible community, and gives more recognition to those supporting others. In terms of asynchronous discussions, and when viewed through the changing demographics of how people interact with projects (already the forum has had significantly more traffic than our lists), it’s just a better way for us to go.

So, we need to transition away from the Google Group mailing list, because splitting the community isn’t helpful either. We’re not going to do that overnight, though, so here’s the plan:

  • today, we’re doing the initial announcement
  • in ~2 weeks time, we’ll enforce using the forum for new posts, and only deal with existing ones here
  • in ~4 weeks time we’ll make this Google group read-only, and handle all support on the forum

This group won’t be deleted, so your bookmarks will still work, and at some point we’ll be able to import the list content to the forum so it’s all in one place.

You can still use email to interact with the forum too - we have a guide available here for doing that. Note that you’ll need to use the web UI or API to start a new topic, but all replies can be handled entirely by mail.

You can register your account here if you haven’t already and there is a dedicated link for creating a new AWX issue. If you have any questions, please reply here, ask in Matrix, or ask in the forum help category.

In Summary

  1. Signup for the Forum
  2. If you prefer email, enable that
  3. Follow the AWX tag

If you aren’t aware, we also have an AWX YouTube channel.

gundalow said

AWX Community Meeting 2023-09-12

Recording: YouTube

Topics:

gundalow shared

AWX Community Office Hour August 2023

Recording: YouTube

Topics

COMMUNITY UPDATES :ear:

Thib contributed

I want my services to be sturdy, cheap & easy to maintain. I want very few moving parts, and I treat the hardware as disposable and unreliable.

Thanks to Ansible, Podman and systemd: My server can burn, my services will run.

HELP WANTED :pray:

samccann contributed

Hacktoberfest has been going on since October 1st and the Ansible projects are participating. See the list of open Hacktoberfest issues and join the fun!

COMMUNITY EVENTS AND MEETUPS :date:

gundalow said

AWX Community Meeting - Oct 2023

Our next meeting will be held on Tuesday, Oct 10th, 2023 at 1500 UTC

Google Meet
Via Phone PIN: 842522378 Guide
This meeting is held once a month, on the second Tuesday of the month, at 1500 UTC

Proposed topics

Got an idea for a topic, add it here.

cybette said

Ansible Buenos Aires will be having a meetup on Wednesday, Oct 11, to discuss Event-Driven Ansible, el Foro de la comunidad y Galaxy NG! Check out the details and RSVP.

cybette shared

Join Colorado Automates in their meetup on Wednesday, Oct 18, with 2 presenters discussing how Ansible is speeding up their organization and partner organizations along with networking mixed in. Details and RSVP.

cybette contributed

This month in Ansible Atlanta meetup on Oct 26 (Thursday), Jeremiah Buckley is going to talk about Ansible Execution Environments. Find out more and RSVP.

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!

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