Support pack config

[nicholasamorim]

Would it make sense to have certain things as pack config? Very much like ansible.cfg in a way.

The config could set variables that are commonly used across all runs such as:

private_key
inventory_file
and some global env values if need be.

[punkrokk]

Can you expand on this thinking @nicholasamorim. I think I know where you are going with this as I have some of this in a fork, but if you could define your requirements in a more complete way it will help everyone hone in on a path forward.

Btw - wouldn't one wish to store things like a private_key in an encrypted datastore value?

[nicholasamorim]

Well, in my specific case, I had to set:

ANSIBLE_SSH_USER to stanley using the env and set the private_key as well as cwd every time I use ansible.playbook.

I know that this stuff can be circumvented by using env vars as well as abstracting the ansible.playbook behind a ST2 workflow.

But I just think it would be nice to provide a set of defaults in /opt/stackstorm/configs/ansible.yaml so that every action would run with them by default. If this would support retrieving from the KV even better.

cwd is a pretty clear case as a lot of people tend to have their playbooks in a single repo/folder in the filesystem.

So an example:

cwd: "/path/to/my/plays"
inventory_file: "envs/{{ st2kv('system.ENV') }}/hosts"
private_key: "/home/stanley/.ssh/stanley_rsa"
env:
   ANSIBLE_SSH_USER: stanley
   ANOTHER_DEFAULT_ENV_VAR: myvalue

So these would always be used unless overriden at the action level.

Does that make sense?

[arm4b]

I'm 👍 with adding additional env to the Ansible pack config, as Ansible exposes every configuration setting as ENV variable.

This way, most of the configuration could be set via ENV and implementation is easy and convenient with current way how the pack is designed as we just need to pass those envs to Ansible execution. As a bonus, variable precedence is on our side when additional CLI params would override ENVs in default Ansible behavior.

Configuration you mentioned above could be transformed to respective env vars:
ANSIBLE_INVENTORY, ANSIBLE_PRIVATE_KEY_FILE, ANSIBLE_SSH_USER

See: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/devel/lib/ansible/config/base.yml for the full list.