Testing playbooks and roles between Ansible versions

[Mike Fennemore]

Hi all,

So I have been looking at moving to later versions of Ansible (currently way back on 2.1.4). Ideally I want to have an automated(or relatively automated)

way to work through all the internal roles and playbooks against different versions of Ansible.

Does anyone currently have this kind of workflow? My initial thought was to have a CI solution to spin up containers/vm's and have it do test runs (Molecule/Test-kitchen)

or alternatively have each version of Ansible run in check mode to check for any possible issues.

The other issue then becomes getting this information out to log processing (logstash perhaps?)

Looking forward to hearing back.

[Mike Fennemore]

The other thought I had was to have ansible-lint and create rules related to the changelogs for each Ansible version.

[aa...@klep.net]

We do something similar when we merge code.  Spin up a VM and run the new code changes basically.  We just review the logs in jenkins (we use that as a frontend instead of Tower) and/or use the slack module to send ourselves any errors.

We took the painful step of going from 2.2 and 2.4 and found mostly our custom modules had to be modified.  We also moved away from any deprecated Ansible modules at the same time (include module, for example) and modified our code for future testing.