ARA Records Ansible

ARA Records Ansible playbook runs and makes the recorded data available and intuitive for users and systems.

The project provides several distinct components in order to make this happen:

• An API server for sending and querying data relative to playbook execution results
• An API client library for communicating with the API
• An Ansible callback plugin to record events as they happen throughout the execution
• An Ansible action module to associate arbitrary key/values to your playbook reports

Quickstart

Here's how you can get started from scratch with default settings:

# Create a virtual environment and activate it so we don't conflict
# with system or distribution packages
python3 -m venv ~/.ara/virtualenv
source ~/.ara/virtualenv/bin/activate

# Install Ansible, ARA and it's API server dependencies
pip install ansible git+https://github.com/openstack/ara@feature/1.0[server]

# Tell Ansible to use the ARA callback plugin
export ANSIBLE_CALLBACK_PLUGINS="$(python -m ara.setup.callback_plugins)"

# Run your playbook as your normally would
ansible-playbook playbook.yml

The data will be saved in real time throughout the execution of the Ansible playbook.

What happens behind the scenes is that the ARA Ansible callback plugin used the built-in API client to send the data to the API which then saved it to a database located by default at ~/.ara/server/ansible.sqlite.

You're now ready to start poking at the API with the built-in API clients !

If you'd like to have the ARA web reporting interface, take a look at ara-web.

Documentation

Documentation for installing, configuring, running and using ara is available on readthedocs.io.

Community and getting help

You can chat with the ARA community on Slack and IRC. The two are transparently bridged with teamchat which broadcasts messages from one platform to the other.

In addition, you can also find ARA on Twitter: @ARecordsAnsible

IRC

• Server: irc.freenode.net
• Channel: #ara

Slack

• https://arecordsansible.slack.com
• Join with the Slack invitation

Development and testing

# Retrieve the source and check out the 1.0 branch
git clone https://github.com/openstack/ara
cd ara
git checkout feature/1.0

# Install tox from pip or from your distro packages
pip install tox

# Run Ansible integration tests with the latest version of Ansible
tox -e ansible-integration

# Run integration tests with a specific version of Ansible
# Note: tox will always use the latest version of Ansible to run the playbook which runs the tests.
# For example, if the latest version of Ansible is 2.7.9, it will use Ansible 2.7.9
# to install Ansible==2.6.15 in a virtual environment and 2.6.15 is what will be tested.
tox -e ansible-integration -- -e ara_tests_ansible_version=2.6.15

# Run integration tests with Ansible from source
tox -e ansible-integration -- -e "ara_tests_ansible_name=git+https://github.com/ansible/ansible"

# Run unit tests
tox -e py3

# Run linters (pep8, black, isort)
tox -e linters

# Run test server -> http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/v1/
tox -e runserver

# Build docs
tox -e docs

Contributors

See contributors on GitHub.

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2019 Red Hat, Inc.

ARA Records Ansible is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

ARA Records Ansible is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with ARA Records Ansible.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.