Publishing Roles To Galaxy

Introduction

Publishing roles to Ansible Galaxy allows you to share your Ansible roles with the community. Galaxy is a free site for finding, downloading, and sharing community developed Ansible roles. This tutorial will guide you through the steps to publish your roles to Galaxy.

Prerequisites

Before you start, ensure you have the following:

An Ansible Galaxy account.
An Ansible role ready to be published.
Installed Ansible on your local machine.

Step 1: Create an Ansible Galaxy Account

If you don't already have an account, you need to create one on the Ansible Galaxy website. Sign up using your GitHub credentials.

Step 2: Prepare Your Role

Ensure your role is properly structured and includes the necessary metadata. Your role should have a meta/main.yml file with information about the role.

Example of meta/main.yml:

galaxy_info:
  author: Your Name
  description: Brief description of the role.
  company: Your Company
  license: MIT
  min_ansible_version: 2.9
  platforms:
    - name: EL
      versions:
        - 7
  categories:
    - system
dependencies: []

Step 3: Log in to Ansible Galaxy

Use the following command to log in to Ansible Galaxy from your terminal:

ansible-galaxy login

This will prompt you to enter your Ansible Galaxy username and password.

Step 4: Initialize a New Role (if necessary)

If you haven't created an Ansible role yet, you can initialize a new one using the following command:

ansible-galaxy init

This command creates a new role with the necessary directory structure.

Step 5: Publish the Role

Navigate to the root directory of your role and run the following command to publish it to Ansible Galaxy:

ansible-galaxy role publish --role-name  --api-key

Replace <role_name> with the name of your role and <your_api_key> with your Ansible Galaxy API key. You can find your API key on your Ansible Galaxy profile page.

Step 6: Verify Your Role

After publishing, you can verify your role by visiting your profile on the Ansible Galaxy website. Your role should be listed there, along with any metadata you provided.

Conclusion

By following these steps, you can publish your Ansible roles to Galaxy, making them available to the community. This not only helps others but also allows you to showcase your work and collaborate with other Ansible users.