Make strategy_plugins obsolete

I’m super impressed by the speedup of ansible_mitogen ! However, there’s one thing blocking the rollout in our opensource project, and this is the fact that you need to specify the location of the ansible_mitogen strategy plugin in ansible.cfg. The location will veary depending of the type of installation, i.e. some will install it under ~/.local/lib/python3.6, some under /user/local/lib/python3.7, some in a virtualenv etc.

We like to ship a ansibile.cfg that doesn’t need to get modified manually, so I wonder if there’s any change that ansible will try to find the plugin path by itself ? That would make it even easier for the user.

[lassizci]

git subtree would be one option… although git lfs bre.aks that

[dmsimard]

Enabling ARA on AWX is a bit more involved because of a bug around the default virtualenv inheriting from an Ansible installed by RPM: https://github.com/ansible/awx/issues/1737.

I never got to the bottom of it but the workaround is:

• Create a virtualenv that doesn’t inherit system-site-packages in /var/lib/awx/venv/foo
• /var/lib/awx/venv/foo/bin/pip install ansible ara
• Add the (system-wide?) callback plugin in the settings UI:
• When configuring job templates, you’ll need to make sure you are using the new virtualenv.

Re: options

• Confuse users as today with a PyPI URL but recommend they don’t use pip. (This provably isn’t working out)

I actually recommend users to install by pip inside a virtualenv. Can you expand on what is confusing with pypi ?

• Wrapper script that changes the interface

To clarify, do you mean something like mitogen -i hosts playbook.yml instead of ansible-playbook -i hosts playbook.yml ? I’ve been avoiding this option so far.

• Helper script that modifies the config (“python -m ansible_mitogen.install /path/to/ansible.cfg”)
• Mess with the system globally somehow
  • Magic setup.py that installs to ~/.ansible or /usr/share/ansible
  • Magic setup.py that installs a magical .pth file that does even more evil things

I’ll report back if I get the chance to experiment on ~/.ansible

What I’d really love is for ansible-galaxy install mitogen to just magically work. Looked at it a couple of times, but always inconclusive whether it’s possible or not.

Let me know if you end up figuring that out, I’m interested 😄