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Comment by avaika | Hacker News Reader

I'm using ansible for some years already. The biggest game changer for me was ansible molecule [0].

I integrated it to the repo, where I store my code and it just runs all the test cases for my code. It saved me a bunch of hours of investigation in test environments before I even released the code. Highly recommend to try it even for a small project.

Apart of that play with ansible strategies if you have more than one server to apply the role. It really might save you some minutes of a runtime.

[0]: https://molecule.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

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This is really great advice. Chef was doing this years ago with test kitchen and inspec (and serverspec). Most community cookbooks came with extensive test suites, and in turn made it easy to encourage people to write tests for cookbooks in house. It seems theres a real lack of testing in opensource Ansible playbooks a lot of the time, and a lot of times when I see it used in organizations.

Same, it saves me so much time knowing my code will work before I have to do a “full run” on a site.yml

After using Ansible for a while at a company I got massively turned off by the fact the version in apt-get doesn't work and if you go to ansible.com there isn't an obvious download button, there's only a button to register for a goddamn free event. There should be a big fucking red "DOWNLOAD" button at the center of ansible.com, and not a goddamn GDPR intrusion and free event. And then if I search Google for "ansible download" I land at a documentation website with 50 billion links.

No. F that. Back to shell scripts. Git clone and run "./install.sh". Most of the things I do are containerized anyway, and the heavy lifting is done by Dockerfile not Ansible, so the install.sh isn't actually that involved.

Hey Ansible if you're reading this, head over to https://google.com/chrome/. Make your front page look like that with a big obvious download button and no popups.

"The version in apt-get", uh-huh.

Do you feel they’re referring to anything else but a binary package repository belonging to a versioned (Debian-style) distro? It’s not helpful to be snarky.

That's interesting, that you're talking about docker and that most things in your environment are dockerized, but didn't check the option to run ansible in docker container. There's publicly available image on docker hub which works without issues.

PS. Just out of curiosity I just tried "ansible install" in google and ddg and the very first link is pointing to an installation guide [0]. The guide gives a very complete installation instructions with multiple options for various systems. You literally can choose whatever fits your environment more.

[0]: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/installation_guide/i...

> After using Ansible for a while at a company I got massively turned off by the fact the version in apt-get doesn't work

FWIW: Works just fine here on Debian (using it since Debian 8, now on Debian 11).

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