This is the second release candidate for the 1.6.0 stable release of ara.

It features a new "tasks" page to browse and search for tasks across playbook runs
as well as many updates, fixes and improvements.

Instructions for upgrading are included in the upgrade notes.

Changes since 1.5.8:

UI
--

- Added a new "Tasks" page similar to the existing pages for Playbooks and Hosts.
  It provides a browseable and searchable overview of tasks across playbook runs.
- Refreshed the host index page:
  - Added a column as well as search arguments for playbook name (or path)
  - Replaced the playbook status by a concise summary of task status for the host

- Updated the playbook summary card to include the playbook id, the version of ara as
  well as the version of python.
- Re-ordered and resized columns in tables to optimize width and improve consistency
- Resized and aligned fields in search forms to use the full width available
- Improved how task tags are displayed
- Updated HTML page titles to be consistent across pages
- Replaced fields for searching by task ID and host ID by task name and host name
- Truncate name fields to prevent exceedinly large names to distort entire tables
- Corrected card header font sizes in the host report page

callback plugin
---------------

- Added support for recording the user who ran the playbook
- Added support for recording the version of ara as well as the version of
  python used when running the playbook
- Added options ARA_RECORD_USER and ARA_RECORD_CONTROLLER that can be
  set to false to avoid recording the user and controller hostname
- Added support for specifying a SSL key, certificate and certificate
  authority for authenticating with a remote ara API server using
  ARA_API_KEY, ARA_API_CERT and ARA_API_CA respectively.
- Fixed host fact recording to ensure it works when using FQCN-style tasks
  (ex: setup & ansible.builtin.setup)
- Increased reliability and accuracy when recording results that can arrive
  out of order when using multi-threading or the free strategy by using the
  task uuid provided by Ansible
- Truncate playbook, play, host and label names in circumstances where their
  length exceeds 255 characters
- Ignore and don't record files in ~/.ansible/tmp by default

API Server
----------

- Bumped django requirement from 2.2 LTS to 3.2 LTS and removed the pin
  on the version of psycopg2 accordingly
- Added a new configuration option, ARA_BASE_PATH, to let the server
  listen on an alternate path. It will continue to default to "/" but it
  could, for example, be set to "/ara/".
- Lifted requirement on tzlocal, improve timezone detection and mitigate
  when the timezone can't be found by defaulting to UTC

- Several new database model and API fields:
  - Added client_version and server_version fields to playbooks, meant to
    represent the version of the ara callback and server used in recording
    the playbook
  - Added python_version field to playbooks to save the version of python
    used by Ansible and the callback plugin when recording a playbook
  - Added a new "failed" status for tasks that is used by the callback plugin
    when there is at least one failed result for a given task
  - Added a new "uuid" field for tasks which is the uuid provided by Ansible
    for a task. It is used by the callback plugin to increase the reliability
    and accuracy when recording results even if they arrive out of order.

- Several fixes and improvements for the distributed sqlite database backend:
  - Added a new index page for listing and linking to available databases.
    This is a work in progress that is intended to be improved in the future.
  - Return a HTTP 405 error when trying to write to read-only endpoints
  - Fixed the /healthcheck/ endpoint to make sure it is routed properly
  - Improved database engine settings and WSGI application configuration
    The WSGI application should now always be "ara.server.wsgi" instead of
    needing to specify "ara.server.wsgi.distributed_sqlite"

API client
----------

- Added support for specifying a SSL key, certificate and certificate
  authority for authenticating with a remote ara API server
- Remove InsecureRequestWarning for insecure requests when SSL verification
  is not enabled.

CLI
---

- Fixed wrong parsing of durations longer than 24 hours
- Added support for searching playbooks by user
- Added support for specifying a SSL key, certificate and certificate
  authority for authenticating with a remote ara API server using
  ARA_API_KEY, ARA_API_CERT and ARA_API_CA respectively.

Docs
----

- Refreshed and improved the README, reformatted it from rst to markdown
- Added a CONTRIBUTING.md file and refreshed contribution documentation
- Explicitly call out and recommend setting up authentication for production
  use in order to prevent leaking sensitive information
- Improved troubleshooting documentation and tips to improve playbook recording
  performance

Tests and miscellaneous
-----------------------

- Bumped the black linter to the latest version and reformatted bits
  of code accordingly
- Updated isort to version 5 and reformatted bits of code accordingly
- Reformatted bits of code using pyupgrade in consideration of dropping
  support for python3.5
- Updated versions of ansible(-core) we run integration tests with to include
  2.9, 2.11, 2.12, 2.13, 2.14 and 6.4.0.
  Although 2.9 is EOL, we will keep it for a while longer.

container-images (contrib)
--------------------------

- The 'latest' tag of container images are now tagged from the latest
  PyPI release instead of the latest git source
- Container images have been updated to the latest distribution images:
  CentOS 8 to CentOS 9 and Fedora 35 to Fedora 36
- Add a centos-source.sh script so we can test from source in addition
  to PyPI
- Install everything from PyPI (except ara when from source) in order
  to avoid mixing distribution packages with PyPI packages

Upgrade notes
-------------

- ara 1.5.8 was the last version to support python3.5.
  Starting with ara 1.6.0, python3.6 or later is required.

- ara 1.6.0 includes several database migrations and it is highly recommended
  to take a backup of the server database before updating.
  Database migrations are run automatically in many circumstances and can be run
  manually using "ara-manage migrate".

- There are a few backwards incompatible changes introduced in ara 1.6.0 which
  makes it important to run the same version of ara everywhere to avoid running
  into problems if the version of the callback plugin and server do not match.

- There is a database migration which grows the maximum length of the name fields
  for plays and labels which was later reverted due to potential issues when using
  the MySQL database backend.