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Volant

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Version 0.1.0-alpha.3

This entry covers the first three pre-releases.

Added

  • volant playbook and volant-playbook: run playbooks made of command, shell and raw tasks, with ansible-playbook’s output, recap and exit codes.
  • Static INI inventories with groups, children and group variables; implicit localhost.
  • The agent binary, running task batches with fail-fast and cancellation.
  • Variables from inventories, group_vars/ and host_vars/ directories, play vars and vars_files, task vars, --extra-vars, register and set_fact, with Ansible’s precedence.
  • Jinja2 templating in strict mode, with the common Ansible filters, tests and lookups, checked against ansible-core.
  • Task keywords when, loop, with_items, loop_control, register, changed_when, failed_when, timeout; controller-side set_fact and debug.
  • --limit, ansible.cfg inventory and timeout, ansible_version and volant_version variables.
  • The ssh connection: the agent is uploaded once per host, cached under remote_tmp per version, and reused by every later run. Space is checked before the write and the upload is atomic.
  • become through sudo, as a play or task keyword and as ansible_become* host variables, with the escalation password read from -K or from a variable and never written anywhere. The agent an escalated task runs is cached under the target user’s own home, so escalating to an account other than root works on a host whose home directories are private.
  • forks, bounding how many hosts a play works on at once, readable as ansible_forks.
  • One agent link per host and target user. The host’s own link is held for the whole run across plays, with a single reconnect when a link dies between plays; an escalated link lasts as long as the batch that needs it, so forks bounds the connections open as well as the hosts working.
  • The full host-pattern grammar: wildcards inside names, ! exclusions, & intersections and [N], [N:M], [N-M] subscripts.
  • New flags -u, --private-key, -f, -b, --become-user, --become-method and -K, and the ansible.cfg keys remote_user, private_key_file, host_key_checking, remote_tmp, forks and the [privilege_escalation] section.
  • Run-level refusals exit with the code the reference gives them: 4 for a playbook that does not parse and for a vars_files value of the wrong type, 1 for a playbook file that is not there and for a pattern that leaves no hosts, 2 for a setting that is refused.
  • A --limit pattern that matches no host warns and narrows the run to what it did match, instead of narrowing it silently.
  • A configuration file that is there and cannot be read stops the run instead of falling back to the defaults.

Changed

  • raw no longer reports cmd, start, end or delta, matching Ansible.
  • A host whose connection type is unknown is reported unreachable; the run continues.
  • Hosts that fail or become unreachable are left out of the following plays.
  • A host reading another host’s variables now waits for the others to reach the same task, so hostvars holds what the reference would show there.
  • ansible_play_hosts and its aliases shrink as hosts fail during a play, instead of listing the play’s original hosts.
  • Each playbook on the command line prints its own recap.
  • Mapping keys keep the order the playbook wrote them, in results and in rendered output.

Fixed

  • Interrupting a run now cancels running tasks on every host and kills their whole process group; SIGTERM is handled like Ctrl-C.
  • A program killed by a signal reports the negative signal number as its return code.
  • Banner widths count characters, not bytes.
  • A failing loop item now reports its own message and the recap counts it as failed, not as changed; an empty loop skips with skipped_reason and an empty results list.
  • omit is removed from lists as well as from dictionaries, at any depth.
  • Integers are typed as YAML 1.1 does, so 0o755, 0x1f and 1_000 read the way the reference reads them, and the bool filter accepts only the spellings Ansible accepts.
  • An inventory name that is both a host and a group resolves to the host and warns once per run, as the reference does.
  • A group listed as its own descendant no longer drops hosts from all, which had made !web, &web and an empty pattern select the wrong set.