Review of the upcoming Vagrant Ansible Local Provisioner

[Gilles Cornu]

Hello Ansiblings,

I am currently working on a guest-based Vagrant provisioner for Ansible (and the consequent refactoring of the legacy host-based Vagrant Ansible provisioner).
This feature is planned to be introduced in Vagrant 1.8.0 (which has no ETA yet).
If you are interested by this new provisioner, and want to be sure that your potential use cases will be well covered, please check the following resources:

• GH-2103: Related Feature Request (comments intended for user wishes and feed-backs)
  
• GH-5340: Related Pull Request (comments intended for technical review)
• Documentation of the upcoming ansible_local provisioner

Many thanks in advance for your feedbacks!

Best,
Gilles

[Dan Vaida]

I salute the initiative and effort. FWIW, I've been using Vagrant with the "normal" Ansible provisioner quite successfully for about a year now. Never felt the need of having something like ansible_local provisioner. Was briefly looking at a few arguments behind this and one was going about doing it because Puppet/Chef have similar provisioners. Well, with the risk of sounding arrogant/dismissive: Ansible is not Chef/Puppet. To me, to install Ansible in the guest is like running ansible-pull via a cron-job: although supported, not so "ansiblish" and embraced by pure Ansiblings (smile). Maybe wrongly see this like a threat to the "agentless" feature.

I'm sure there will be loads of adepts and heck, I'll try it out myself, who knows, might even like it after all.

Hope I didn't offend anyone; that was not my intent. I believe everything created around Ansible is worth the appreciation and respect, so that's my honest opinion on the mater.

Dan.

[Michael Peters]

One use-case that you might not have thought of is developers using
Windows, even if the target machine is Linux. I had this problem on a
previous team and had to hack our own provisioning step to use the
shell and run vagrant locally. Windows will probably never be able to
run vagrant. But why should that matter? I have a linux vm running
that can run ansible locally just fine. Also, it allows me to control
the host that ansible runs on even if the developer is a linux/osx
user I don't want to make sure he has his local ansible configured
correctly or even installed.

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[Gilles Cornu]

Hi again dear Ansiblings!

It has been a long time since I started this thread, but now Vagrant 1.8.0 is around the corner (ETA is currently for end of November 2015).

Thanks Dan and Michael for your nice feedbacks. Note that I'm also a huge fan(atic) of Ansible-ssh-push-based-and-agent-less model, but in the different Vagrant use cases (yes, Windows-based developers, I am looking at you mostly ;-) the need for this alternative provisioner is quite strong. A good thing is that both provisioners share a maximum of code, and I am pretty confident about their future maintenance.

So, the `ansible_local` provisioner will be introduced very soon, and it is also planned to introduce as of Vagrant 1.8 the support for ansible-galaxy (in both ansible provisioners).

If you are interested in these new upcoming features, and have little spare time within the following days, I invite you to look at https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/pull/6529, and more specifically https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/commit/c1f3d114f52654e9f285499dd548409edc0c99fe.

Does it fit with your Vagrant/Ansible usage?

Again, many thanks in advance and best regards!

Gilles