ansible-galaxy collection install requires a mandatory -p option

[anshulbehl]

SUMMARY

-p or --collections-path should not be mandatory and should pick up value of COLLECTIONS_PATH variable.
As a user of collection if I don't know which path ansible is using to load collection I will tend to make mistakes installing the collection to right path.
COLLECTIONS_PATH will make sure the collection will get picked up for sure.

ISSUE TYPE

• Feature Idea

COMPONENT NAME

COLLECTIONS

ANSIBLE VERSION

ansible 2.9.0.dev0
  config file = /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg
  configured module search path = [u'/home/abehl/.ansible/plugins/modules', u'/usr/share/ansible/plugins/modules']
  ansible python module location = /home/abehl/work/src/anshul_ansible/ansible/lib/ansible
  executable location = /home/abehl/work/src/anshul_ansible/ansible/bin/ansible
  python version = 2.7.16 (default, Apr 30 2019, 15:54:43) [GCC 9.0.1 20190312 (Red Hat 9.0.1-0.10)]

CONFIGURATION

OS / ENVIRONMENT

STEPS TO REPRODUCE

Try installing a collection without giving -p option

EXPECTED RESULTS

if -p provided use provided path, if not provided use COLLECTIONS_PATHS variable

ACTUAL RESULTS

-p is mandatory right now

[sivel]

It is expected that the user must provide this value, and this was an explicit choice on our part.

Documentation is in the process of being updated currently: #60164

In the future, we may extend this to include some form of default value.

If you have further questions please stop by IRC or the mailing list:

• IRC: #ansible on irc.freenode.net
• mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/ansible-project

[chrismeyersfsu]

This would be less painful if the debugging output, when you are testing calling the collection you installed, was more verbose. But, as it stands, the debug output when a collection is not found is not very useful.

[anshulbehl]

Reopening
@thaumos Can you take a stab as this and please close if this doesn't make sense

[jborean93]

During the intial development for ansible-galaxy collection install we couldn't come to a consensus of what should be the default install location. The end result was to punt the decision and make it a mandatory argument. For now this won't change for the 2.9 release so I am going to close the issue.