Support for custom (collection) templates

[skwde]

ISSUE TYPE

• Feature Idea

SUMMARY

Having many custom collection that share the same base file (.devcontainer, .gitignore, various lint config files, ....) are hard to update and it is only possibly by manually doing the changes.

It would be helpful if we do something like use

ansible-creator add resource .devcontainer <path to custom collection>

to update the .devcontainer folder according to the template.

[shatakshiiii]

Hi @skwde , We do support ansible-creator add resource devcontainer <collection-path>

So you can add a devcontainer folder to your custom collection path.

You can refer this doc for more detail.

Please let me know if you meant anything else or if I need to elaborate more on this .Thanks!!

[skwde]

Thanks for your reply @shatakshiiii

Yes, I am aware of that, but to my understanding this always takes a hardcoded devcontainer template (shipped with ansible-creator)?

I would like to use a custom devcontainer, modified to my needs.
I also would like to modify other files as well (since our collections are only internal they are not on galaxy).

Sorry for not being clearer from the beginning.

[shatakshiiii]

I would like to use a custom devcontainer, modified to my needs.

Okay, got it. Thanks for the clarification @skwde

So there a bit of customisation that we support for specifying the image inside devcontainer.
There is a CLI option --image that supports adding "auto", "upstream" or "aap" images based on what you are choosing.

Example:

ansible-creator add resource devcontainer --image=aap <collection-path>

Please let us know if you are looking for some other custom configuration inside your devcontainer.

Thanks for putting this here btw!

[skwde]

Thanks @shatakshiiii actually my request is not only related to devcontainers.
It is more general.

It would be good to have this possibility for an entire collection, i.e. telling ansible-creator where to take the reference files.

Similar to what we can do with

ansible-galaxy collection init --collection-skeleton=<path to custom skeleton> <collection fqdn>

[cidrblock]

Hey @skwde, sorry about the delayed response.

We've talked about this in the past and were kind of waiting for some feedback on it.

Any thoughts on how this would work?:

1. Would the user reference a github repo?
2. Maybe we add a plugin architecture to creator using pluggy? (the user would have to maintain a python project, but we could scaffold that I guess)
3. Would it just be a directory?
4. Would we need to template any j2 file swe found? The vars we use for templating are not really "public" or documented and more of an internal implementation detail
5. Would we scaffold the default project then overlay the user provided source on top of it?

I like the idea, always have, we would appreciate your thoughts here, if we can come to a sane implementation without getting to complicated, we might be able to fit it in at some point.

-brad

[skwde]

Thanks @cidrblock for the response and taking my suggestion into account, this would certainly be a huge improvement (at least from my perspecitive).

It is quite a while that I came across this and haven't thought about it since. So let's see what I can dig up.

What I imagine is very similar to

ansible-galaxy collection init --collection-skeleton=<path to custom skeleton> <collection fqdn>

but only to update certain files / folders like .devcontainer, various configs (linter / pre commit / ci/cd), .vscode.

I think the most helpful (to me) would be to be able to reference a git repository / local folder.
Templating out would be nice because it opens up more flexibility for the user, but in a first step I think it is not necessary.

Maybe an additional option like

ansible-creator add resource --from <path to local / git repo> <file / folder / resource from local / git repo, e.g. .devcontainer folder> <path to collection where resource should be added>

[cidrblock]

Thanks, I think the first pass might be to introduce a new flag call it ammend or overlay that accepts a directory and simply copies it's contents directly on top of the scaffolded project.

the second step would be to extend it to use a repo, we would do a simple clone into a tmp dir and then follow the same "drop it on top" approach.

later if people are interested, we could add more functionality like templating.

thoughts?

[skwde]

Sounds like a good plan!

I think it is also important that this can be used to update files in an already existing project, not only when setting up a new project. So without using the default scaffolded project used by ansible-creator.

Will this be the case?