The Ansible Plugin

When I started thinking about the Ansible Plugin, I knew that there were lots of directions that I could take the project. Ansible has a great API that exposes all of its functionality to developers. At the same time, I wanted to keep the Plugin very simple, because it was my first Plugin for Cloudify.

I began with the most essential functionality: installing Ansible on the manager.

Two components are necessary to accomplish this:

• An install script (which I wrote in Python).
• A Cloudify Blueprint that describes the installation workflow.

The Python script is just a simple installation script using pip.

At first I wrote it to use the package manager native to the Linux distribution. In the end, I realized that this complicates package installation.

Why? Shouldn't it simplify the installation? No. Because the Manager is bootstrapped with pip, and runs in a virtualenv installed by pip, using pip ensures that your plugin installation uses the same libraries that the manager uses.

Since the manager is going to be running the plugin, this is very important.