Include molecule-plugins

[syaghoubi00]

It would be nice for the molecule-plugins package to be included by default. Since podman is included in the image, being able to set the driver as podman or containers in molecule.yml would be a good enhancement.

Right now my workaround is building a new image using
Containerfile

FROM ghcr.io/ansible/community-ansible-dev-tools:latest

RUN pip install molecule-plugins

But this feels like it should be unnecessary.

[ssbarnea]

podman plugin is already include in devspaces image but not in the execution environment one, via https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aansible%2Fansible-dev-tools%20molecule-plugins&type=code -- that seems like a good opportunity to consolidate these.

At the same time my concern is that we are currently going into a direction of making molecule plugins redundant and discourage their use. Even our examples in molecule avoid their use, see https://ansible.readthedocs.io/projects/molecule/examples/podman/

So, it might prove better to remove podman plugin from devspaces.

[syaghoubi00]

Good to know about the molecule plugins. Until the plugins are officially deprecated, in my opinion it would probably make sense to keep them included with the dev-tools.

So - to consolidate:

• remove

  ansible-dev-tools/devspaces/context/requirements.txt

  Line 2 in b733166

  molecule-plugins[podman]==23.5.3

• add molecule-plugins to .config/requirements.in, which is called by

  ansible-dev-tools/pyproject.toml

  Line 372 in b733166

  dependencies = {file = [".config/requirements.in"]}

  during

  ansible-dev-tools/tools/ee.sh

  Line 63 in b733166

  python -m build --outdir "$REPO_DIR/final/dist/" --wheel "$REPO_DIR"

  but I'm not sure how it will get included in the build of tools/devspaces.sh.

---

Or - to be ahead of the curve, just remove the molecule-plugins entirely, which would just be a matter of deleting it from the devspaces/requirements.txt

[jcox10]

@ssbarnea You mentioned that the molecule plugins/drivers are being deprecated and their use is discouraged. Is there any documentation or blogs that have more details on that direction? The Molecule docs are not very clear, the examples show defining your own create/destroy plays, but then this page says "The create/destroy playbooks for Docker and Podman are bundled with Molecule", but it seems that is only true when using a driver/plugin.