Trying to understand the new AWX 18+ build process

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I am trying to figure out how to customize an AWX build prior to deployment. In the older versions if we needed to add more galaxy collections we just added a line to collection_requirements.yml and ran the playbook to start the install

Now it appears we need to build an Execution Environment and use Ansible Builder. I just dont understand the workflow. I installed Execution Environment and Builder using pip into a virtual env, but I dont really know what to do with .

I am trying to take the vanilla awx either 18 or 19 and add some hashicorp_vault stuff form galaxy.

Any tips on what to do would be appreciated.

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Hi Joey

Perhaps my blog will get you started - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/creating-custom-ee-awx-phil-griffiths/

Phil.

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Thanks Phil, I had found that yesterday, it really helped things click.

For anyone else that finds themselves confused between old AWX and new, AWX no longer really runs the playbooks. Please Phil or anyone else correct me if I am explaining the wrong. AWX almost itself becomes a container tool. You build out AWX using the new install method and its really just the vessel for EE. Once you have AWX up and running you use ansible-builder to build Execution Environments that then get hosted on AWX. From there you point your playbooks to whatever EE you need.

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I have actually been through this exercise and while following @Phil example is true I found that the ansible runner image pulled from Quay.io is borked. I was constantly getting issues with as outlined here

https://github.com/ansible/awx/issues/9917#issuecomment-826142808

No matter what I did I was constantly getting that error. The fix is provided here :

https://github.com/ansible/awx/issues/9917#issuecomment-829372195

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Thanks for highlighting. Looks like ansible-runner is moving on a pace!

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Yeah. The design spec was to pull from the container. But the fix was to pip from 2.0.0.1a(iirc). Now I have the baked in dependencies I want. Thank you Phil. This is the best thing that the team has done. It means I can write local actions type custom libraries in a language that I am used to. All I have to do is output json in a certain way and it is done.