Collection-level dependencies
When Ansible Builder installs collections into an execution environment, it also installs their controller-side Python or system package dependencies listed by each collection on Galaxy.
For Ansible Builder to find and install collection dependencies, those dependencies must be defined in files in a collection repository.
Note
If present, the files below must be included in the packaged collection on Galaxy.
Ansible Builder cannot install dependencies listed in files that are included in the build_ignore
of a collection, because those files are not included in the collection artifact.
If you are a collection maintainer, make sure the controller-side dependencies are specified and verified.
We recommend you specify paths to dependency files in the meta/execution-environment.yml
file.
Here is an example of its content:
dependencies:
python: meta/ee-requirements.txt # List Python package requirements in the file
system: meta/ee-bindep.txt # List system package requirements in the file
If the meta/execution-environment.yml
file is not present, by default, Ansible Builder will expect the dependencies to be defined in:
the
requirements.txt
file in the collection root directory for Python package requirementsthe
bindep.txt
file in the collection root directory for system package requirements
Note
If your collection uses the requirements.txt
or bindep.txt
files in its root directory for anything else but its controller-side dependencies, for example, for listing testing requirements, make sure you use the meta/execution-environment.yml
file to specify other dependency files for execution environment purposes.
Dependency introspection
If any dependencies are given, the introspection is run by Ansible Builder so that the requirements are found and sanitized (deduped) before container image assembly.
A user can see the introspection output during
the builder intermediate phase using the build -v3
option.
How to verify collection-level metadata
Note
Running the introspect command described below is not part of a typical workflow for building and using execution environments.
Collection developers can verify that dependencies specified in the collection will be processed correctly by Ansible Builder.
To do that, the collection has to be installed locally.
When installing collections using ansible-galaxy
The easiest way to install a collection is to use the ansible-galaxy
command which is a part of the ansible
package.
Run the introspect
command against your collection path:
ansible-builder introspect --sanitize COLLECTION_PATH
The default collection path used by the ansible-galaxy
command is ~/.ansible/collections/
.
Read more about collection paths in the Ansible configuration settings guide.
The --sanitize
option reviews all of the collection requirements and removes duplicates. It also removes any Python requirements that should normally be excluded (see Python Dependencies below).
Note
Use the -v3
option to introspect
to see logging messages about requirements that are being excluded.
When installing collections manually
If you download collection tarballs from Galaxy manually or clone collection git repositories,
for the introspect
command to work properly, be sure you store your collections
using the following directory structure:
ansible_collections/NAMESPACE/COLLECTION
For example, if you need to inspect the community.docker
collection, the path will be:
ansible_collections/community/docker
Then, if the ansible_collection
directory is in your home directory, you can run introspect
with the following command:
ansible-builder introspect --sanitize ~/
Python Dependencies
Ansible Builder combines all the Python requirements files from all collections into a single file using the requirements-parser
library. This library supports complex syntax, including references to other files.
If multiple collections require the same package name, Ansible Builder combines them into a single entry and combines the constraints.
Certain package names are specifically ignored by ansible-builder
, meaning that Ansible Builder does not include them in the combined file of Python dependencies, even if a collection lists them as dependencies. These include test packages and packages that provide Ansible itself. The full list can be found in EXCLUDE_REQUIREMENTS
in src/ansible_builder/_target_scripts/introspect.py
.
If you need to include one of these ignored package names, use the --user-pip
option of the introspect
command to list it in the user requirements file. Packages supplied this way are not processed against the list of excluded Python packages.
System-level Dependencies
For system packages, use the bindep
format to specify cross-platform requirements, so they can be installed by whichever package management system the execution environment uses. Collections should specify necessary requirements for [platform:rpm]
.
Ansible Builder combines system package entries from multiple collections into a single file.
Requirements with
compile
profile indicate that these requirements are needed to install other requirements (especially Python ones), but are not required to be in the final build.Requirements with
epel
profile indicate that EPEL repositories will be enabled before installing these requirements.Only requirements with no profiles (runtime requirements) are installed to the image.
Entries from multiple collections which are outright duplicates of each other may be consolidated in the combined file.