Today we are happy to release Ansible 1.6, which adds over 30+ new core modules to the open source automation system, in addition to incorporating numerous new options, upgrades, fixes, and improvements.

The highlights of the 1.6 release are without a doubt a slew of great new module additions, including many new additions for Amazon, Rackspace, and Digital Ocean. These are complemented by tons more including CPAN, Portage, Homebrew Taps and Casks, Rollbar, Librato, Nexmo, Twilio, and Slack. This release also debuts inclusion of a VMware inventory script and provisioning module. There’s also a new example inventory script that polls a series of Docker hosts for containers they are running. Lots of new things!

Perhaps one of the features that will likely go most unnoticed is the removal of legacy variables like “$foo”, which for a long time have been off by default and have raised deprecation warnings. For reference, the proper way to reference a variable is to use Jinja2 variable syntax, using curly braces. We’ve been mentioning this for a long time, but this may catch you if you are upgrading from a much older version of Ansible. This is our last planned language change for a very long time (other than adding new keywords).

The default fact gathering policy is now configurable in ansible.cfg. The system can be set to gather facts every play, to gather them only when explicitly requested, or only gather facts for new hosts that have not yet been talked to (which was the default behavior in previous releases).

To support retries of failed configuration runs, the new parameter “—force-handlers” will trigger all handlers for a given playbook, whether or not they have been notified.

For the full list of changes, see the change log at https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/devel/CHANGELOG.md.

Ansible 1.6 is live in the python package index now ("pip install ansible"), and will be available in your OS distribution mirrors shortly.

To hear all the latest about Ansible 1.6, Ansible Tower, future developments, as well as how tons of amazing people are using Ansible in the Wild, you are welcome to join us for AnsibleFest, May 20th, in New York City. Speakers include Twitter, ThoughtWorks, Rackspace, Google, and more.

Reserve your seat here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ansiblefest-nyc-2014-tickets-10952628607

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