Ansible 2.3 was released. I’m pretty sure you’ve seen things online about it, and probably read the changelog.

Networking modules were a big thing this release.

So big, it’s easy to overlook the rest. Here are, in my opinion, many other things worth glancing over for 2.3 (discovered from commits, or from the changelog):

• ansible_user doesn’t work anymore if you don’t have a variable explicitly set (depends on your connection plugin). If you have facts gathered, you may want to use ansible_user_id. This bug has already been fixed in the 2.3 branch and will probably be shipped in version 2.3.0.1
• Vars precedence and inheritence have changed. Please have a look at the docs for variable precedence. I have to test if it broke my vars_plugins.
• module_utils for custom modules can be shipped with roles. \o/
• a passwordstore lookup was introduced (see also passwordstore.org). Maybe it was there before, but I can’t remember it, and I love it.
• a keyring lookup was introduced.
• You can now have a more terse run output with the new dense callback plugin.
• YAML and pickle cache support! Interesting, I think I will prefer YAML compared to all of the existing cache plugins.
• There are new combinations and permutations filters.
• We now finally have archive, long after unarchive.
• New/Updated toys (modules) are available for ansible stats, wait for connection, nginx, openssl, jenkins groovy scripts, parted, tempfile, zfs, Clear Linux, HP ILO, FreeIPA, iso extraction, ldap, logstash, netapp, omapi, ovirt, serverless, openbsd, let’s encrypt, the usual clouds, …
• Time to flatten your package lists yourself again! removed ‘package’ from default squash actions as not all package managers support it and it creates errors when using loops, any user can add back via config options if they don’t use those package managers or otherwise avoid the errors. Great. Moar slowness.
• Blocks can now have a name field. I like this improved readability.
• SO MUCH WOW with strategies: Default strategy is now configurable via ansible.cfg or environment variable. That’s a change I love, mainly because I now have a different way to use a strategy I wrote (with the help of Kevin Carter, see in openstack-ansible-plugins) without changing my playbook.
• There are changes in the way multiple --tags given in the CLI behave. On this note, if you’re tired of all of these changes, you can use my/our tag filtering strategy ;)
• restructured how async works to allow it to apply to action plugins that choose to support it. Great, we’ll have to adapt config-template action plugin, if need be.

• I am now forced to have a look at our custom connection plugin because of the multiple connection/retry behavior changes. For example:

  • On platforms that support it, use more modern system polling API instead of select in the ssh connection plugin. This removes one limitation on how many parallel forks are feasible on these systems
  • added optional ‘piped’ transfer method to ssh plugin for when scp and sftp are missing, ssh plugin is also now ‘smarter’ when using these options
  • On top of that, there were other changes linked to connections/retries.

• I. FEEL. THE. DANGER. : Fixed issues with inventory formats not handling ‘all’ and ‘ungrouped’ in an uniform way.

• Yum state: list now works with disable repo and enable repo.

• Split on newlines when searching become prompt (5).

• LXC module doesn’t have a problem with HOSTNAME in bashrc anymore.

• The ansible-galaxy init can now take a skeleton argument, and/or read env vars for skeleton role location.

• The message “skipping: no hosts matched” has returned!

• The apt_repository module got a bug fixed.