molecule VS ara

Hell, the ansible roles I maintain use Molecule for testing.

The Ansible team announced at AnsibleFest and Ansible Community Days last month that Molecule will be released as a developer preview on its way to being a fully supported part of the Ansible platform. In order to achieve this, Molecule will need to be streamlined and refocused as a test runner for functional testing of Ansible playbooks and roles using Ansible itself. This will require a number of breaking changes to happen before releasing “Molecule 6” in order to do all of this. You can read about the changes here and we welcome your questions and feedback on their roll out: https://github.com/ansible-community/molecule/milestone/35

I would recommend you to use roles instead of just playbooks and to test them with molecule. Molecule allows you to quickly test your Ansible roles in a fresh Arch Linux podman container, completely isolated from your real system.

Please post comments on https://github.com/ansible-community/molecule/discussions/3555

Projects to make it easier to write and test Ansible Content. Includes VScode extension, language server, ansible-lint, molecule, ansible-navigator and potentially other development goodies. To see what's planned, and how you can help checkout the foundation-devtools project board

I’m assuming you are using Molecule: https://github.com/ansible-community/molecule

Please upvote your prefered answer from the https://github.com/ansible-community/molecule/discussions/3130 survey which proposed joining ansible-lint and ansible-molecule channels when we move them from freenode irc to libera.chat. There is also an option to keep the channels separated.

Just as a heads up, Molecule has a very active discussion area on GitHub.

Ansible Molecule

But to be fair, a lot has changed since 2017 :)

Look into AWX as an alternative to Tower. If you just want better reporting on runs, check out ARA or callback plugins.

Also worth considering is ARA for playbook reporting, and then whatever you want for orchestration (Jenkins, Azure Devops, Rundeck, etc).

Why not use ara?

For general recording of playbook activity with a web dashboard, ARA works really well.

If you don’t want any UI / access control then you can also look at ARA - https://ara.recordsansible.org This works as a callback plugin to capture the job run data.

I'm not sure how to interpret running 100 debug messages (https://github.com/ansible-community/ara/blob/master/tests/integration/benchmark_tasks.yaml) into real life performance. Mitogen's Benchmark used either 100 times a "hostname" command on the target machine (https://github.com/mitogen-hq/mitogen/blob/master/tests/ansible/bench/loop-100-items.yml) or running the DebOps project (https://github.com/debops/debops-playbooks/blob/master/playbooks/common.yml) for some sorta real-world module usage.

Reach out on Mastodon or see this issue on GitHub.

There has been discussions about a prometheus exporter for monitoring, metrics and eventually fancy graphs in grafana but work on this has not started yet: https://github.com/ansible-community/ara/issues/177