On-prem ansible galaxy

Generic ansible roles can be shared through ansible galaxy though in many cases we can not use ansible galaxy as its hosted publicly. Solution is to host something similar to ansible galaxy on-prem.

On-prem galaxy repository

• For this blog I am considering stash (https://stash.company.com) but gitlab, gogs or similar should work as well
• Create a new project on stash Ansible Galaxy with key AG
• Create repo for each generic ansbile role.
• We can browse through all the generic ansbile roles at https://stash.company.com/projects/AG
• Now these roles can be used with multiple ansible playbooks.

Usage

• Create a new file requirements.yml alongside ansible playbook.yml.
• For this blog purposes I am considering awscli as an generic ansible role with its own repo, which resides in our newly created stash project Ansible Galaxy (AG)

• Copy/paste below content to requirements.yml

    ---
    name: awscli
    src: git+https://stash.company.com/scm/ag/awscli
    version: master
    path: ~/.ansible/roles
  
    # name - name of role
    # src - location of role
    # version - which branch the role should be installed from
    # path - where we want to install roles
  

• The requirements.yml files acts as a role dependency list for our playbook.yml

Installation

• Once we define our ansible playbook dependencies, its time to install them.

    sudo ansible-galaxy install -r requirements.yml
  
    # NOTE: no need to install ansible-galaxy seperately, it ships with default ansible installation
  

• Done! all the roles are now installed and ready to be used by our playbook.yml