While Ansible is mostly used in Linux environments, it can also be used to manage other UNIX variants like Solaris. Now the central hub for Ansible roles, Ansible Galaxy, also added support for the platform Solaris.

Ansible is handy tool to manage multiple servers. Besides the usual Linux distributions it features support for BSD variants, Solaris and even Windows. However, the central hub to share Ansible roles, Ansible Galaxy, was still missing Solaris support until now: the support was added for version 10 as well as version 11.

That can already be seen when a role template is generated with the Galaxy tools:

$ ansible-galaxy init acme --force - acme was created successfully $ grep -B 1 -A 8 Solaris acme/meta/main.yml # - any #- name: Solaris # versions: # - all # - 10 # - 11.0 # - 11.1 # - 11.2 # - 11.3 #- name: Fedora

This opens up the possibility to provide Ansible roles including Solaris support at a central place. Right now I already have a pull request to enable Solaris support on a very powerful Apache role. In a following blog report I’ll add the (surprisingly few) steps which were necessary to adjust the role to support Solaris.

It is great that Ansible Galaxy adds more and more platforms and thus broadens the usage of the central hub to cover more and more use cases. I’m looking forward to see more and more Solaris roles in the Galaxy. If you need help porting a role don’t hesitate to contact me.

The support is so far still in internal testing and will be made final when the above mentioned Github issue is closed.