ansible-later

This is a fork of Will Thames ansible-review so credits goes to him for his work on ansible-review and ansible-lint.

ansible-later is a best pratice scanner and linting tool. In most cases, if you write ansibel roles in a team, it helps to have a coding or best practice guideline in place. This will make ansible roles more readeble for all maintainers and can reduce the troubleshooting time.

ansible-later does not ensure that your role will work as expected.

ansible-later is an acronym for Lovely Automation TEsting fRmework.

Table of Content

• Setup
  • Using pip
  • From source
• Usage
  • Configuration
  • Review a git repositories
  • Review a list of files
  • Buildin rules
• Build your own
  • The standards file
  • Candidates
  • Minimal standards checks
• License
• Maintainers and Contributors

---

Setup

Using pip

# From internal pip repo as user
pip install ansible-later --user

# .. or as root
sudo pip install ansible-later

From source

# Install dependency
git clone https://repourl
export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:`pwd`/ansible-later/ansiblelater
export PATH=$PATH:`pwd`/ansible-later/ansiblelater/bin

Usage

ansible-later FILES

Where FILES is a space delimited list of files to review. ansible-later is not recursive and won't descend into child folders; it just processes the list of files you give it.

Passing a folder in with the list of files will elicit a warning:

WARN: Couldn't classify file ./foldername

ansible-later will review inventory files, role files, python code (modules, plugins) and playbooks.

• The goal is that each file that changes in a changeset should be reviewable simply by passing those files as the arguments to ansible-later.
• Roles are slightly harder, and sub-roles are yet harder still (currently just using -R to process roles works very well, but doesn't examine the structure of the role)
• Using {{ playbook_dir }} in sub roles is so far very hard.
• This should work against various repository styles
  • per-role repository
  • roles with sub-roles
  • per-playbook repository
• It should work with roles requirement files and with local roles

Configuration

If your standards (and optionally inhouse rules) are set up, create a configuration file in the appropriate location (this will depend on your operating system)

The location can be found by using ansible-later with no arguments.

You can override the configuration file location with the -c flag.

[rules]
standards = /path/to/your/standards/rules

The standards directory can be overridden with the -d argument.

Review a git repositories

• git ls-files | xargs ansible-later works well in a roles repo to review the whole role. But it will review the whole of other repos too.
• git ls-files *[^LICENSE,.md] | xargs ansible-later works like the first example but excludes some unnecessary files.
• git diff branch_to_compare | ansible-later will review only the changes between the branches and surrounding context.

Review a list of files

• find . -type f | xargs ansible-later will review all files in the current folder (and all subfolders), even if they're not checked into git

Buildin rules

Reviews are nothing without some rules or standards against which to review. ansible-later comes with a couple of built-in checks explained in the following table.

Rule	ID	Description	Parameter
check_yaml_empty_lines	LINT0001	YAML should not contain unnecessarily empty lines.	{max: 1, max-start: 0, max-end: 0}
check_yaml_indent	LINT0002	YAML should be correctly indented.	{spaces: 2, check-multi-line-strings: false, indent-sequences: true}
check_yaml_hyphens	LINT0003	YAML should use consitent number of spaces after hyphens (-).	{max-spaces-after: 1}
check_yaml_document_start	LINT0004	YAML should contain document start marker.	{document-start: {present: true}}
check_yaml_colons	LINT0005	YAML should use consitent number of spaces around colons.	{colons: {max-spaces-before: 0, max-spaces-after: 1}}
check_yaml_file	LINT0006	Roles file should be in yaml format.
check_yaml_has_content	LINT0007	Files should contain useful content.
check_native_yaml	LINT0008	Use YAML format for tasks and handlers rather than key=value.
check_line_between_tasks	ANSIBLE0001	Single tasks should be separated by an empty line.
check_meta_main	ANSIBLE0002	Meta file should contain a basic subset of parameters.	author, description, min_ansible_version, platforms, dependencies
check_unique_named_task	ANSIBLE0003	Tasks and handlers must be uniquely named within a file.
check_braces	ANSIBLE0004	YAML should use consitent number of spaces around variables.
check_scm_in_src	ANSIBLE0005	Use scm key rather than src: scm+url in requirements file.
check_named_task	ANSIBLE0006	Tasks and handlers must be named.	excludes: meta, debug, include_*, import_*, block
check_name_format	ANSIBLE0007	Name of tasks and handlers must be formatted.	formats: first letter capital
check_command_instead_of_module	ANSIBLE0008	Commands should not be used in place of modules.
check_install_use_latest	ANSIBLE0009	Package managers should not install with state=latest.
check_shell_instead_command	ANSIBLE0010	Use Shell only when piping, redirecting or chaining commands.
check_command_has_changes	ANSIBLE0011	Commands should be idempotent and only used with some checks.
check_empty_string_compare	ANSIBLE0012	Don't compare to "" - use when: var or when: not var
check_compare_to_literal_bool	ANSIBLE0013	Don't compare to True/False - use when: var or when: not var
check_literal_bool_format	ANSIBLE0014	Literal bools should be written as True/False or yes/no	forbidden values are `true

Build your own

The standards file

A standards file comprises a list of standards, and optionally some methods to check those standards.

Create a file called standards.py (this can import other modules)

from ansiblelater include Standard, Result

tasks_are_uniquely_named = Standard(dict(
    id="ANSIBLE0003",
    name="Tasks and handlers must be uniquely named within a single file",
    check=check_unique_named_task,
    version="0.1",
    types=["playbook", "task", "handler"],
))

standards = [
  tasks_are_uniquely_named,
  role_must_contain_meta_main,
]

When you add new standards, you should increment the version of your standards. Your playbooks and roles should declare what version of standards you are using, otherwise ansible-later assumes you're using the latest. The declaration is done by adding standards version as first line in the file. e.g.

# Standards: 1.2

To add standards that are advisory, don't set the version. These will cause a message to be displayed but won't constitute a failure.

When a standard version is higher than declared version, a message will be displayed 'WARN: Future standard' and won't constitute a failure.

An example standards file is available at ansiblelater/examples/standards.py

If you only want to check one or two standards quickly (perhaps you want to review your entire code base for deprecated bare words), you can use the -s flag with the name of your standard. You can pass -s multiple times.

git ls-files | xargs ansible-later -s "bare words are deprecated for with_items"

You can see the name of the standards being checked for each different file by running ansible-later with the -v option.

Candidates

Each file passed to ansible-later will be classified. The result is a Candidate object which contains some meta informations and is an instance of one of following object types.

Object type	Description
Task	all files within the parent dir tasks
Handler	all files within the parent dir handler
RoleVars	all files within the parent dir vars or default
GroupVars	all files (including subdirs) within the parent dir group_vars
HostVars	all files (including subdirs) within the parent dir host_vars
Meta	all files within the parent dir meta
Code	all files within the parent dir library, lookup_plugins, callback_plugins and filter_plugins or python files (.py)
Inventory	all files within the parent dir inventory and inventory or hosts in filename
Rolesfile	all files with rolesfile or requirements in filename
Makefile	all files with Makefile in filename
Template	all files (including subdirs) within the parent dir templates or jinja2 files (.j2)
File	all files (including subdirs) within the parent dir files
Playbook	all yaml files (.yml or .yaml) not maching a previous object type
Doc	all files with README in filename

Minimal standards checks

A typical standards check will look like:

def check_playbook_for_something(candidate, settings):
    result = Result(candidate.path) # empty result is a success with no output
    with open(candidate.path, 'r') as f:
        for (lineno, line) in enumerate(f):
            if line is dodgy:
                # enumerate is 0-based so add 1 to lineno
                result.errors.append(Error(lineno+1, "Line is dodgy: reasons"))
    return result

All standards check take a candidate object, which has a path attribute. The type can be inferred from the class name (i.e. type(candidate).__name__) or from the table here.

They return a Result object, which contains a possibly empty list of Error objects. Error objects are formed of a line number and a message. If the error applies to the whole file being reviewed, set the line number to None. Line numbers are important as ansible-later can review just ranges of files to only review changes (e.g. through piping the output of git diff to ansible-later).

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.

Maintainers and Contributors

Robert Kaussow