Foreman Ansible Modules

Ansible modules for interacting with the Foreman API and various plugin APIs such as Katello.

Documentation

A list of all modules and their documentation can be found at theforeman.org/plugins/foreman-ansible-modules.

Documentation how to write, test and debug modules is available in the docs folder.

Support

Supported Foreman and plugins versions

Modules should support any currently stable Foreman release and the matching set of plugins. Some modules have additional features/arguments that are only applied when the corresponding plugin is installed.

We actively test the modules against the latest stable Foreman release and the matching set of plugins.

Supported Ansible Versions

The supported Ansible versions are aligned with currently maintained ansible versions. You can find the list of maintained Ansible versions here. Older Ansible versions (Ansible >= 2.3) should work but are not tested.

As we're using Ansible's documentation fragment feature, that was introduced in Ansible 2.8, ansible-doc prior to 2.8 won't be able to display the module documentation, but the modules will still run fine with ansible and ansible-playbook.

Supported Python Versions

Starting with Ansible 2.7, Ansible only supports Python 2.7 and 3.5 (and higher). These are also the only Python versions we develop and test the modules against.

Known issues

• Some modules, e.g. katello_sync and katello_content_view_version, trigger long running tasks on the server side. It might be beneficial to your playbook to wait for their completion in an asynchronous manner. As Ansible has facilities to do so, the modules will wait unconditionally. See the Ansible documentation for putting tasks in the background.

• foreman_compute_resource leak sensible data if used within a loop. According to ansible documentation, using loop over ansible resources can leak sensible data. You can prevent this by using no_log: yes on the task.

  eg:

  - name: Create compute resources
    foreman_compute_resource:
      server_url: https://foreman.example.com
      username: admin
      password: changeme
      validate_certs: yes
      name: "{{ item.name }}"
      organizations: "{{ item.organizations | default(omit) }}"
      locations: "{{ item.locations | default(omit) }}"
      description: "{{ item.description | default(omit) }}"
      provider: "{{ item.provider }}"
      provider_params: "{{ item.provider_params | default(omit) }}"
      state: "{{ item.state | default('present') }}"
    loop: "{{ compute_resources }}"
    no_log: yes

Installation

There are currently three ways to use the modules in your setup: install from Ansible Galaxy, install via RPM and run directly from Git.

Installation from Ansible Galaxy

You can install the collection from Ansible Galaxy by running mazer install theforeman.foreman (Ansible 2.8) or ansible-galaxy collection install theforeman.foreman (Ansible 2.9 and later).

After the installation, the modules are available as theforeman.foreman.<module_name>. Please see the Using Ansible collections documentation for further details.

Installation via RPM

The collection is also available as ansible-collection-theforeman-foreman from the client repository on yum.theforeman.org starting with Foreman 1.24.

After installing the RPM, you can use the modules in the same way as when they are installed directly from Ansible Galaxy.

Run from Git

If you don't want to install the collection, or use an Ansible version that does not support collections (< 2.8), you can consume the modules directly from Git.

Just clone the foreman-ansible-modules git repository to your machine and add the path to the modules to ansible.cfg.

Let's assume you have a directory of playbooks and roles in a git repository for your infrastructure named infra:

infra/
├── ansible.cfg
├── playbooks
└── roles

First, clone the repository into infra/:

cd infra/
git clone https://github.com/theforeman/foreman-ansible-modules.git

Now edit ansible.cfg like this:

[defaults]
library = foreman-ansible-modules/plugins/modules
module_utils = foreman-ansible-modules/plugins/module_utils
doc_fragment_plugins = foreman-ansible-modules/plugins/doc_fragments
filter_plugins = foreman-ansible-modules/plugins/filter

As the modules are not installed inside a collection, you will have to refer to them as <module_name> and not as theforeman.foreman.<module_name>.

Dependencies

These dependencies are required for the Ansible controller, not the Foreman server.

• PyYAML
• apypie
• ipaddress for the foreman_subnet module on Python 2.7

Branches

• master - current development branch, using the apypie library
• nailgun - the state of the repository before the switch to the apypie library started, nailgun is the only dependency