This might be best implemented as an option in the .yml file (e.g. develop: true) to clone and fetch/(merge/warn) on particular roles.

It looks like there was an attempt to do this already. The PR is still pending, and seemed to be waiting for v2.

#6537

PR was closed, this feature has not been implemented.

PR was closed, this feature has not been implemented.

Just to elaborate, this was not blocked or rejected, rather because of time/development/release issues. So working on a PR for this feature might still be worthwhile.

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Just to be clear, is the ask to use a flag or option within ansible-galaxy to do a git clone as opposed to just downloading a tarball?

This should be a flag for the ansible-galaxy command. Opposed to the view of @umeboshi2 I think it is best not to touch requirements.yml for this use-case. Only maintainers - tool smiths - will need this flag for integration testing and developing roles in separate repositories.

I would have to disagree with @bbaassssiiee. while you are correct that this option would primarily be used by maintainers/tool smiths, Many of them will likely (and hopefully do) have automation in place as part of their validation flow. using tools like Ansible Tower/AWX which supports the requirements.yml convention, but doesn't allow you to modify the command that is executed to download the roles.

As a result, an option in the requirements.yml file would be the best choice to provide this feature.

Additionally, for public repos, it could aid in the collaborative development of roles, allowing for easier PR back to the master branch.

Agree with @bbaassssiiee Automation flows should exist, but I don't think developers should be coding on roles checked out by tower.

• checkout all roles for a play to a dev host somewhere (ansible-galaxy install --clone)
• update roles and check with some local testing
• commit and push so tower/jenkins can do more rigorous testing.

e224039 is helpful; thanks.

Maybe --clone-full and --clone-shallow ansible-galaxy switches would be helpful and useful?
I'd like to send PRs upstream; but in order to get e.g. a .git directory, I have to clone clone these urls as subrepos myself.

If I have this requirements.yml:

- src: linux-system-roles.network
  # https://github.com/linux-system-roles/network

When I do:

ansible-galaxy install -v -g --roles-path=./roles -r ./requirements.yml

ansible-galaxy downloads archives by default. But it could instead lookup the current repo url and do a full or a shallow clone; thus making it that much easier to send PRs to helpful role maintainers.