Collection-level dependencies

When Ansible Builder installs collections into an execution environment, it also installs the dependencies listed by each collection on Galaxy.

For Ansible Builder to find and install collection dependencies, those dependencies must be defined in one of these files:

  • The meta/execution-environment.yml file containing the Python and/or bindep requirements or referencing other files listing them. The .yaml extension is also valid on this file.

  • The requirements.txt file in the root level of the collection.

  • The bindep.txt file in the root level of the collection.

These files must be included in the packaged collection on Galaxy. Ansible Builder cannot install dependencies listed in files that are included in the build_ignore of a collection, because those files are not uploaded to Galaxy.

Dependency introspection

If any dependencies are given, the introspection is run by Ansible Builder so that the requirements are found and sanitized (deduped) before container image assembly.

A user can see the introspection output during the builder intermediate phase using the build -v3 option.

How to verify collection-level metadata

Note

Running the introspect command described below is not part of a typical workflow for building and using execution environments.

Collection developers can verify that dependencies specified in the collection will be processed correctly by Ansible Builder.

In order to do that, the collection has to be installed locally.

When installing collections using ansible-galaxy

The easiest way to install a collection is to use the ansible-galaxy command which is a part of the ansible package.

Run the introspect command against your collection path:

ansible-builder introspect --sanitize COLLECTION_PATH

The default collection path used by the ansible-galaxy command is ~/.ansible/collections/. Read more about collection paths in the Ansible configuration settings guide.

The --sanitize option reviews all of the collection requirements and removes duplicates. It also removes any Python requirements that should normally be excluded (see Python Dependencies below).

Note

Use the -v3 option to introspect to see logging messages about requirements that are being excluded.

When installing collections manually

If you download collection tarballs from Galaxy manually or clone collection git repositories, for the introspect command to work properly, be sure you store your collections using the following directory structure:

ansible_collections/NAMESPACE/COLLECTION

For example, if you need to inspect the community.docker collection, the path will be:

ansible_collections/community/docker

Then, if the ansible_collection directory is in your home directory, you can run introspect with the following command:

ansible-builder introspect --sanitize ~/

Python Dependencies

Ansible Builder combines all the Python requirements files from all collections into a single file using the requirements-parser library. This library supports complex syntax, including references to other files.

If multiple collections require the same package name, Ansible Builder combines them into a single entry and combines the constraints.

Certain package names are specifically ignored by ansible-builder, meaning that Ansible Builder does not include them in the combined file of Python dependencies, even if a collection lists them as dependencies. These include test packages and packages that provide Ansible itself. The full list can be found in EXCLUDE_REQUIREMENTS in src/ansible_builder/_target_scripts/introspect.py.

If you need to include one of these ignored package names, use the --user-pip option of the introspect command to list it in the user requirements file. Packages supplied this way are not processed against the list of excluded Python packages.

System-level Dependencies

For system packages, use the bindep format to specify cross-platform requirements, so they can be installed by whichever package management system the execution environment uses. Collections should specify necessary requirements for [platform:rpm].

Ansible Builder combines system package entries from multiple collections into a single file.

  • Requirements with compile profile indicate that these requirements are needed to install other requirements (especially Python ones), but are not required to be in the final build.

  • Requirements with epel profile indicate that EPEL repositories will be enabled before installing these requirements.

  • Only requirements with no profiles (runtime requirements) are installed to the image.

Entries from multiple collections which are outright duplicates of each other may be consolidated in the combined file.