This is not Alma specific, but I am trying to build a server for a capstone course that is cisco, windows and linux network/sysadmin focused. The students will implement ansible to automate network config management, among other tasks.
While I teach red hat at my community college, and there are free subscriptions for red hat iso’s for developers that I could get from redhat, using Alma just makes things easier when I’m building an internet isolated network that is sand-boxed away from everything and the students can’t break anything important - no need to complete the yearly subscriptions, for example.
I’ve installed ansible-navigator and the other dependencies on the alma 10 machine and installed the default collections.
I think I’ve installed the cisco collection but when I use the TUI to explore the collections I do not see cisco.ios
I ran ansible-galaxy collection install cisco.ios and got the “Nothing to do. All requested collections are already installed” response.
I’m just wondering if anyone knows if the cisco.ios collection is limited to people with red hat subscriptions or I’m misunderstanding something.
If anyone can point me in the right direction to get this up and running, I would be most grateful.
Just a a quick followup, I’ve been doing a little more investigating and it MIGHT be related to the execution environment??
Apparently, collections can be installed in different locations and each execution environment has it’s own locally known collections path that do not necessarily match up with where I think I my cisco.ios collection was installed,
Will followup when I have a chance to investigate in more depth.
Add any thoughts or corrections to my line of thinking
I have never used ansible-navigator so your question got me curious.
When checking the github readme for ansible-navigator I see that it uses a containerized environment to run. I quote the interesting part,
“By default, ansible-navigator uses a container runtime (podman or docker, whichever it finds first) and runs Ansible within an execution environment (a pre-built container image which includes ansible-core along with a set of Ansible collections.)”
So it seems that you only see the collections inside of the container when running the ansible-navigator collections command. If you add the option –-ee false or --execution-environment false to the collections subcommand it will leave the containerized env and look outside for collections installed in the path shown if you execute ansible –-version.
I hope this helps you a bit.
Now I found more info in the ansible-navigator FAQ.
With a little help from the community, I’ve been able to confirm that if you run ansible-navigator without an execution environment set ( the - -ee=false) I can now see the collections on installed on my host machine.
I’m going to play with mounting the host directory with the collections into the proper location in a running ansible-navigator container next.
- no need to complete the yearly subscriptions, for example.