The Ansible Development Process

This section discusses how the Ansible development and triage process works.

Road Maps

The Ansible Core team provides a road map for each upcoming release. These road maps can be found here.

Pull Requests

Ansible accepts code via pull requests (“PRs” for short). GitHub provides a great overview of how the pull request process works in general.

Because Ansible receives many pull requests, we use an automated process to help us through the process of reviewing and merging pull requests. That process is managed by Ansibullbot.

Backport Pull Request Process

After the pull request submitted to Ansible for the devel branch isaccepted and merged, the following instructions will help you create apull request to backport the change to a previous stable branch.

We do not backport features.

Note

These instructions assume that:

  • Prepare your devel, stable, and feature branches:
  1. git fetch upstream
  2. git checkout -b backport/2.7/[PR_NUMBER_FROM_DEVEL] upstream/stable-2.7
  • Cherry pick the relevant commit SHA from the devel branch into your featurebranch, handling merge conflicts as necessary:
  1. git cherry-pick -x [SHA_FROM_DEVEL]

  • Add a changelog fragment for the change, and commit it.

  • Push your feature branch to your fork on GitHub:

  1. git push origin backport/2.7/[PR_NUMBER_FROM_DEVEL]

  • Submit the pull request for backport/2.7/[PR_NUMBER_FROM_DEVEL]against the stable-2.7 branch

  • The Release Manager will decide whether to merge the backport PR beforethe next minor release. There isn’t any need to follow up. Just ensure that the automatedtests (CI) are green.

Note

The choice to use backport/2.7/[PR_NUMBER_FROM_DEVEL] as thename for the feature branch is somewhat arbitrary, but conveys meaningabout the purpose of that branch. It is not required to use this format,but it can be helpful, especially when making multiple backport PRs formultiple stable branches.

Note

If you prefer, you can use CPython’s cherry-picker tool to backport commitsfrom devel to stable branches in Ansible. Take a look at the cherry-pickerdocumentation fordetails on installing, configuring, and using it.

Ansibullbot

Overview

Ansibullbot serves many functions:

  • Responds quickly to PR submitters to thank them for submitting their PR
  • Identifies the community maintainer responsible for reviewing PRs for any files affected
  • Tracks the current status of PRs
  • Pings responsible parties to remind them of any PR actions for which they may be responsible
  • Provides maintainers with the ability to move PRs through the workflow
  • Identifies PRs abandoned by their submitters so that we can close them
  • Identifies modules abandoned by their maintainers so that we can find new maintainers

Community Maintainers

Each module has at least one assigned maintainer, listed in a maintainer’s file:

Some modules have no community maintainers assigned. In this case, the maintainer is listed as $team_ansible. Ultimately, it’s our goal to have at least one community maintainer for every module.

The maintainer’s job is to review PRs and decide whether that PR should be merged (shipit) or revised (needs_revision).

The ultimate goal of any pull request is to reach shipit status, where the Core team then decides whether the PR is ready to be merged. Not every PR that reaches the shipit label is actually ready to be merged, but the better our reviewers are, and the better our guidelines are, the more likely it will be that a PR that reaches shipit will be mergeable.

Workflow

Ansibullbot runs continuously. You can generally expect to see changes to your issue or pull request within thirty minutes. Ansibullbot examines every open pull request in the repositories, and enforces state roughly according to the following workflow:

  • If a pull request has no workflow labels, it’s considered new. Files in the pull request are identified, and the maintainers of those files are pinged by the bot, along with instructions on how to review the pull request. (Note: sometimes we strip labels from a pull request to “reboot” this process.)
  • If the module maintainer is not $team_ansible, the pull request then goes into the community_review state.
  • If the module maintainer is $team_ansible, the pull request then goes into the core_review state (and probably sits for a while).
  • If the pull request is in community_review and has received comments from the maintainer:
    • If the maintainer says shipit, the pull request is labeled shipit, whereupon the Core team assesses it for final merge.
    • If the maintainer says needs_info, the pull request is labeled needs_info and the submitter is asked for more info.
    • If the maintainer says needs_revision, the pull request is labeled needs_revision and the submitter is asked to fix some things.
  • If the submitter says ready_for_review, the pull request is put back into community_review or core_review and the maintainer is notified that the pull request is ready to be reviewed again.
  • If the pull request is labeled needs_revision or needs_info and the submitter has not responded lately:
    • The submitter is first politely pinged after two weeks, pinged again after two more weeks and labeled pending action, and the issue or pull request will be closed two weeks after that.
    • If the submitter responds at all, the clock is reset.
  • If the pull request is labeled community_review and the reviewer has not responded lately:
    • The reviewer is first politely pinged after two weeks, pinged again after two more weeks and labeled pending_action, and then may be reassigned to $team_ansible or labeled core_review, or often the submitter of the pull request is asked to step up as a maintainer.
  • If Shippable tests fail, or if the code is not able to be merged, the pull request is automatically put into needs_revision along with a message to the submitter explaining why.

There are corner cases and frequent refinements, but this is the workflow in general.

PR Labels

There are two types of PR Labels generally: workflow labels and information labels.

Workflow Labels

  • community_review: Pull requests for modules that are currently awaiting review by their maintainers in the Ansible community.
  • core_review: Pull requests for modules that are currently awaiting review by their maintainers on the Ansible Core team.
  • needs_info: Waiting on info from the submitter.
  • needs_rebase: Waiting on the submitter to rebase.
  • needs_revision: Waiting on the submitter to make changes.
  • shipit: Waiting for final review by the core team for potential merge.

Informational Labels

  • backport: this is applied automatically if the PR is requested against any branch that is not devel. The bot immediately assigns the labels backport and core_review.
  • bugfix_pull_request: applied by the bot based on the templatized description of the PR.
  • cloud: applied by the bot based on the paths of the modified files.
  • docs_pull_request: applied by the bot based on the templatized description of the PR.
  • easyfix: applied manually, inconsistently used but sometimes useful.
  • feature_pull_request: applied by the bot based on the templatized description of the PR.
  • networking: applied by the bot based on the paths of the modified files.
  • owner_pr: largely deprecated. Formerly workflow, now informational. Originally, PRs submitted by the maintainer would automatically go to shipit based on this label. If the submitter is also a maintainer, we notify the other maintainers and still require one of the maintainers (including the submitter) to give a shipit.
  • pending_action: applied by the bot to PRs that are not moving. Reviewed every couple of weeks by the community team, who tries to figure out the appropriate action (closure, asking for new maintainers, etc).

Special Labels

  • new_plugin: this is for new modules or plugins that are not yet in Ansible.

Note:new_plugin kicks off a completely separate process, and frankly it doesn’t work very well at present. We’re working our best to improve this process.