As community documentation guidelines for testing Ansible collections are still pending update, I will try to clarify few of the most important aspects today.
You will see collections and content used almost as synonims, and that is not wrong. Colections can contain any combination of playbooks, roles, plugins or modules.
Collections do replace the galaxy roles which are now in deprecation mode, and the only expectation is that authors will convert them to collections. If they decide to group multiple roles into a single collection or keep them separated is fully up to them.
Keep in mind that all the tools mentioned below are under active development as their maintainers are doing their best to improve them.
All projects but one, ansible-test, are community supported which means that they do relay on community for making improvements and bugfixes. If you find a bug on any of these, you can go directly and make a PR to fix it.
Tools and project to use
- ansible-lint can help you with a huge range of aspects, including steps you need to take in the future. It is by far the easier tool to introduce to your workflow.
- molecule covers functional and integration testing of ansible playbooks and roles, basically using ansible to test ansible. It does not depend
- ansible-test is included with Ansible and is focused on testing ansible modules, with different versions of python or ansible. If you have ansible modules inside your repository. If you are acustomized with testing pyramid, you could put ansible-test somewere between unit and functional testing.
- toolset is a container that combines all the development tools above alongside latest version of Ansible. The project is very new, and it aims to help those that may not fully master the art of installing python packages using pip inside virtual environments.
- protogen is another fresh project that aims to become a reference implementation on how to write and test a collection. Basically it is an attempt to document by example how to do it right.
Q&A
Should I use molecule or ansible-test?
Both projects are supported, if the most important part of your code are roles and playbooks, use molecule first.
If the most important part are ansible modules, pick ansible-test.
If you have boths, sooner or later you will need both.
At least for the forseable future none of them is going to replace the other.
What can I do if I need to support ancient ansible versions?
While collections were only introduced in Ansible 2.9, there is nothing stopping you from converting your repository to a collection layout while still keeping your code compatible with old versions of Ansible.
Basically collections resolve the packaging and installation issue, so for older versions of Ansible, you will have to install them manually in locations where ansible can find them.
If you already have a roles folder at the root of your repository you are
likely already half-way towards a collection. Look at collection structure and see
what changes you should do.
If you do not need to support Windows platform, you can make use of relative symlinks in order to ease migration without breaking software that may expect your roles to be in a different location.
Where can I get help?
If you want to chat, the best place to engage with others is #ansible-community
irc channel on freenode.