ansible-pull minimal standalone version

[Christian Frieß]

Hi everyone,

after using ansible for a while successfully in a environment of roughly 1000 virtual servers, I'm planning a slightly different approach.

Rather than running ansible on one (or more) central server, I'd like to install ansible-pull on each server and run it on demand or via cronjob only.

Since our systems get their packages from an internal repository, I'm lacking some of the dependencies for the regular ansible installation. However, I'm not looking to install the huge ansible package anyways but rather only what I need.

What would be the steps to find out what to include in the custom rpm to run ansible-pull only?

I'm looking to get a very slim, light-weight package which only supports what I need it to support.

[Brian Coca]

ansible-pull uses ansbile and ansible-playbook under the hood, so the
ansible package IS the minmal package available

you might want to trim modules/plugins you don't use but that depends
on the plays being executed.



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Brian Coca

[Christian Frieß]

Thanks, I noticed this when I crawled through the source code over the weekend.

Interesting, that it's just symlinks..

I'm looking to trim modules but all the time I find more directories where modules or configuration files for modules are stored.

I found this at at least 3 places and it seems like a lot of trouble to remove modules I don't need since sometimes I can just delete whole directories and then again there are directories where all modules have one file each inside the directory and I need to go through all of them.

Now, what happens if I miss removing all files of a module? Will this produce an error or will I just not be able to use that module?

[Brian Coca]

Most modules are a single file, the 'multiple files' are normally 'non
python modules' and the .py that holds the documentation. Since
Ansible only ships with python and powershell modules you would only
have multiple files for .ps1 modules.
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Brian Coca