virtualenv_ansible_python

Ever have an instance where you're trying to run a playbook and you need a particular Python package to support that one Ansible module, but you just can't find a system package for it anywhere? Or it lives in someone's package module repo that has way too much cruft, or you don't know whether it will continue existing and stay updated long enough? Or you don't trust the responsible parties?

This role will stand up a virtualenv in a temporary directory, install a list of pip packages into it, and then set that virtualenv as the Python interpreter for the rest of the playbook. Never fear, though. It will register the existing interpreter to the variable virtualenv_ansible_python_original_interpreter so that you can always go back to it in the future, if you need to.

Requirements

Ansible 2.4 or higher

Role Variables

Currently the following variables are supported:

General

• virtualenv_ansible_python_packages - default: empty list. A list of packages to install to the virtualenv. These need to be a list of dicts in the form {"name": "some_pkg", "version": "123"} where the "version" key is optional and will default to the latest stable version on PyPI when.
• virtualenv_ansible_python_site_packages - default: true. Flag determining if the Virtualenv should be created with all the system packages already present. Usually this is a good thing, and is very important on RHEL/CentOS/Fedora systems when SELinux is eanbled, as the Python libselinux bindings are not easily installed into a virtualenv otherwise.
• virtualenv_ansible_python_dir - Leave this blank if you want this role to create a new tempdir version of Python to hold the virtualenv. If you want to use an existing virtualenv or a pre-determined path to the executable, then you can specify this as the root of the virtualenv to be created
• virtualenv_ansible_python_original_interpreter - this is not an input variable but will contain the path to the original Python interpreter that was executing modules coming into this role. So this is more of an output/return type of variable

Dependencies

A sysmte with virtualenv available

Example Playbook

- hosts: virtualenv_ansible_python-servers
  roles:
    - role: greg_hellings.virtualenv_ansible_python
      virtualenv_ansible_python_packages:
        - dnspython
        - openstacksdk

License

GPLv3

Author Information

Greg Hellings [email protected]