The JFrog Artifactory integration with Ansible allows you to manage Ansible collections in Artifactory. Ansible is an open-source platform that enables you to automate IT processes such as provisioning, application deployment, orchestration, and more. Ansible Galaxy is the public registry for Ansible roles and collections.
To learn more about collections and roles, refer to the following:
Collections are a distribution format for Ansible content that can include playbooks, roles, modules, and plugins. You can install and use collections through a distribution server, such as Ansible Galaxy, or a Pulp 3 Galaxy server.
Roles let you automatically load related vars, files, tasks, handlers, and other Ansible Artifacts based on a known file structure. After you group your content into roles, you can easily reuse and share it with other users.
Main Features of Ansible in Artifactory
Artifactory supports managing Ansible roles and collections, ensuring optimal and reliable access to Ansible Galaxy.
Single Point of Truth
This integration allows users to work with the Ansible registry, and manage and save their Ansible collections in Artifactory while providing full flexibility and usability.
Secure Private Ansible Registry with Fine-Grained Access Control
Local Ansible repositories are where you store internal Ansible collections for distribution across your organization. With the fine-grained access control provided by built-in security features, Artifactory offers secure Ansible collections publish and install with local Ansible repositories as fully functional, secure, private Ansible registries.
Consistent and Reliable Access to Remote Roles and Collections
Remote Ansible Repositories in Artifactory proxy external resources such as Ansible-Galaxy or a remote Ansible registry in another Artifactory instance, and cache downloaded images. This reduces overall networking and creates fast, consistent, and reliable access to roles and collections on these remote resources.
Access multiple Ansible repositories from a single URL by aggregating them under a Virtual Repository. This overcomes the limitation of the Ansible client, which can only access a single registry at a time.
Artifactory supports the installation of roles via Remote repositories if configured.
Ansible Supported Clients
Ansible package registry supports the following and has been tested:
Ansible Core version 2.17 or above
Ansible community package release v10.x or above.
Limitations of Ansible in Artifactory
The following are the limitations of Ansible in Artifactory:
Remote Role Installing: Artifactory does not support installing roles from any Git repository via remote repositories.
Local Role Publishing: Artifactory does not support publishing roles into local repositories. Instead, roles must be wrapped in collections. For instructions on how to do this, please see Migrating roles to collections.
Repository Browsing: Artifactory does not support browsing Ansible remote registries. The artifact tree only shows packages explicitly pulled into Artifactory, not the contents of the remote registry.