The Fedora and EPEL ansible packages are as up to date as possible, but sometimes you want to run a newer, not yet released ansible version for any of a number of reasons:

  • To confirm a bug is fixed.
  • To test an RC for the next release or look for regressions on the devel branch.
  • To see if a change caused any performance improvements or regressions.

Happily this is very easy to do with ansible:

  1. clone the ansible repo: ‘git clone https://github.com/ansible/ansible.git’
  2. checkout the branch or thing you want to test. For example now stable-2.1 branch has the latest 2.1.x rc, and stable-2.2 has the code for the latest 2.2 rc.
  3. ‘source ansible/hacking/env-setup’ This will set your ansible/ansible-playbook commands to use your checkout instead of any locally installed version.

I use this setup to test new versions/RC’s over the Fedora Infrastructure playbooks. It’s very handy to catch last minute bugs in RC’s and/or to clean up depreciations so when the next version is actually released you are already ready for it.

Happy ansible hacking.