Updates to Ansible Galaxy Search Functionality

[rochacbruno (Bruno Rocha)]

Hello Ansible Galaxy community,

We have heard your suggestions in this forum, and we are redesigning the Galaxy search functionality based on your feedback.

Since this feature is entirely geared towards the community’s needs, we would appreciate hearing your feedback and ideas for improvement. It would be valuable to understand your primary use cases for searching content on the Ansible Galaxy website.

The overhaul of the search API is currently underway in the following Pull Request: https://github.com/ansible/galaxy_ng/pull/1973

So far, we have implemented filtering by Search Vector (websearch), which matches names, namespaces, descriptions, tags, and platforms. Exact filtering is also available for fields, deprecated, tags, and platforms.

There is also a future plan to merge platforms and tags into a single field.

You can now sort results by name, namespace, update date, and relevance.

Additionally, this search page will merge collections and roles into a single results page, with an indication in the “type” field to facilitate filtering.

At the moment, we are focusing on the API for this search, and soon we will commence work on Design and UI. We also welcome community contributions regarding the user interface to make the search more user-friendly and useful.

Important note is that this search for now is for the website browsing only, not affecting the CLI search yet.

Thank you in advance,

Galaxy Dev Team

[karlamag]

Hello, I’m Karla, a UI/UX designer and I’d like to contribute to this open-source project. I had a productive discussion with @rochacbruno, who provided valuable insights. Following an in-depth analysis of both the old and new Galaxy websites’ search pages and drawing inspiration from usability aspects on major package management sites, we’ve seamlessly integrated these ideas into the proposed improvements:

• Ensure a consistent design for component borders.
• Implement a slide-down filter box that combines all filtering options, highlighting the primary search term.
• Separate the sorting of filters to avoid confusion.

I’ve attached a screenshot for reference, and for a better view, I highly recommend exploring the live preview clicking here.

I’m open to any suggestions and more than willing to make necessary adjustments. I’m happy to be a part of this community.

Regards,
Karla

[samccann (Sandra McCann)]

This is a great improvement! I’m not a real galaxy user but one thing I’d suggest is to make the title just Find Ansible content. People aren’t installing or publishing from this search functionality.

What are the ‘sort’ options, btw?