Ansible Lint misclassifies template folders as roles

[tadeboro]

Summary

When linting roles, Ansible Lint will misclassify subdirectories in the templates directory as roles.

Issue Type

• Bug Report

Ansible and Ansible Lint details

ansible --version
ansible [core 2.11.6]
  config file = /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg
  configured module search path = ['/home/tadej/.ansible/plugins/modules', '/usr/share/ansible/plugins/modules']
  ansible python module location = /home/tadej/ansible-community/ansible-lint/venv/lib64/python3.9/site-packages/ansible
  ansible collection location = /home/tadej/.ansible/collections:/usr/share/ansible/collections
  executable location = /home/tadej/ansible-community/ansible-lint/venv/bin/ansible
  python version = 3.9.7 (default, Aug 30 2021, 00:00:00) [GCC 11.2.1 20210728 (Red Hat 11.2.1-1)]
  jinja version = 3.0.2
  libyaml = True

ansible-lint --version
ansible-lint 5.2.1 using ansible 2.11.6

• ansible installation method: pip
• ansible-lint installation method: editable install from main branch

OS / ENVIRONMENT

Fedora 34

STEPS TO REPRODUCE

cd /tmp
ansible-galaxy role init test
cd test
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aminvakil/ansible-role-node-exporter/master/meta/main.yml -o meta/main.yml 
rm .travis.yml 
ansible-lint 
git init
git add .
git commit -m "test"
ansible-lint 
for i in *; do cd $i && git submodule add https://github.com/ansible/distro-test-containers/ distro-test && cd ../; done

The output we get is something like this:

WARNING  Listing 1 violation(s) that are fatal
role-name: Role name distro-test does not match ``^[a-z][a-z0-9_]+$`` pattern
templates/distro-test:1

Desired Behaviour

Ansible Lint should ignore anything in the templates directory (and probably also in all other standard role directories).

Actual Behaviour

Ansible Lint treats the subdirectory as a role and outputs all kinds of nonsense when trying to lint unstructured files.

Additional data

The source of the issue is the kind_from_path function. Because template files and folds do not have a dedicated entry in DEFAULT_KINDS, directories under templates classify as roles. We could probably solve this by adding an entry like {"template": "**/templates/*"} to DEFAULT_KINDS, but I did not test this nor did I think much about the consequences this addition might have on the linter.

This issue was discovered by Amin and reported via IRC. Thank you, Amin!

[ssbarnea]

Indeed this looks like the something sorted like you mentioned and it should be quite easy to include a test for it. I would start adding the files/folder inside examples for replicating the bug first.

[tadeboro]

Replicating this issue with pure folders is not possible. Because Ansible Lint uses git to get a list of files it should inspect, we would need to add a "git boundary" to the folder. Git itself will never report folders in the listing since they contain no content which is what git tracks.

[ssbarnea]

I think it would be ok to ignore templates. Feel free to add a new pattern for that. I think that there are just too many cases where linter would choke on templates, even simple yamllint execution is likely to fail with some templated files.