# Your Feedback Wanted: The Ansible Collection Developer and Maintainer Journey

**URL:** <https://forum.ansible.com/t/your-feedback-wanted-the-ansible-collection-developer-and-maintainer-journey/44592>\
**Category:** Collection Development\
**Tags:** news-for-maintainers, ansible-creator, devtools, ansible-navigator, community-wg, adt, ansible-lint, ansible-builder\
**Created:** [October 1, 2025, 6:21am UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/your-feedback-wanted-the-ansible-collection-developer-and-maintainer-journey/44592 "2025-10-01T06:21:44Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 3

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![dbrennand](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/ansible/user_avatar/forum.ansible.com/dbrennand/32/7830_2.png) [@dbrennand](https://forum.ansible.com/u/dbrennand)\
**Post date:** [October 2, 2025, 8:04am UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/your-feedback-wanted-the-ansible-collection-developer-and-maintainer-journey/44592/3 "2025-10-02T08:04:20Z")

</div>

As a new maintainer for [`community.beszel`](https://github.com/ansible-collections/community.beszel) my general feedback is below 🙂

## Community Collection Template

The [community collection template](https://github.com/ansible-collections/collection_template) was very useful and took away a lot of work from my side for getting started with a new collection. On a side note, it might be worth re-evaluating the template now that `ansible-creator` exists and can also scaffold a collection. Which one is the standard practice now? Possibly needs a sync up with the Dev Tools team on that.

## Ansible Dev Environment

The `ansible-dev-environment` package has helped massively with issues I’ve had in the past where `molecule` discovers collection and role dependencies elsewhere on the system instead of in my Python virtual environment. 👍

## Ansible Dev Tools Package

I’m not currently using the `ansible-dev-tools` meta package because it always installs the latest tooling versions. My requirement is to version constraint (`ansible-core`, `ansible-lint` etc) to avoid breaking changes. As a collection maintainer, I want contribution to be easy and the last thing I want is a potential contributor to give up because the instructions in my `CONTRIBUTING.md` don’t work anymore because of a breaking change. I’m currently version constraining these packages in `test-requirements.txt` or `pyproject.toml` files.

## Ansible Test

Being a newcomer to `ansible-test` I found the UX strange coming from other Dev Tools such as `molecule`. The biggest thing for me was that when using the `—docker` flag, `ansible-test` didn’t automatically install Ansible collection or role dependencies for my tests like `molecule` does:

```yaml
---
...
dependency:
  name: galaxy
  options:
    requirements-file: "${MOLECULE_SCENARIO_DIRECTORY}/../requirements.yml"

```

I think there is an opportunity for improving the documentation and was being discussed in [Ansible-test not loading collections from requirements.yml - #6 by dbrennand](https://forum.ansible.com/t/ansible-test-not-loading-collections-from-requirements-yml/39431/6) as I couldn’t find any documentation that a specific directory structure is required for `ansible-test` to find those dependencies.

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