[QUESTION] What happening with this project? Is still alive?

[davorceman]

What's happening with the molecule-ec2 plugin? The version I installed is quite buggy, it requires a lot of minor fixes. Already 74 Issues created, bat I also noticed that there are many open pull requests, and that's it... only 2 closed ones all this time.

I haven't used molecule before, and now I'm contemplating whether to write create and destroy templates or try with minimal changes until this project continues to develop.

[apatard]

The exact status is unknown. From various places, the idea from some ansible (RedHat?) developers is to kill plugins, they hate the idea of having some python glue code. They mainly argue that writing python code to test ansible content is bad, even if in practice, with this project, I don't see where users need to write python code. Moreover, while the plugin support has not been killed (yet?), it has already some bugs (removed support for plugins templates iirc).

While I'd like to see plugin still live, there's nothing I can do. Given that these days my free time is scarce, I'll look at this project only when official statement is done. I don't want to loose time helping to maintain something which is about to die. I even considered having my own local copy/fork of molecule to ensure plugins are still working, but I fear it would be too much work.

[isuftin]

I wonder what a substitute would be if the plugins were to go away...

[zhan9san]

@apatard

Thanks for your work. It's very nice to work with you on this project.

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I hope to make the plugins active again and let the plugins do hard work for the real users. https://github.com/ansible/molecule/discussions/4019#discussioncomment-6775916

The plugins are also the combination of ansible playbooks, and they are out-of-box. Once it is installed, the users don't need to write/maintain many ansible playbooks.

The plugins are still in verison 6, https://github.com/ansible/molecule/issues/3919#issuecomment-1648021007, and I hope it can keep alive in future release.

[dometto]

@zhan9san that sounds like great news!

@apatard does that mean it makes sense to open PRs with improvements for this repo again?

Thank you both for the maintenance work you are doing, I know from experience how much time goes into it!

[apatard]

@zhan9san thanks. Just to be clear. If redhat people says that they will never kill (molecule-)plugins support in molecule, I'll do my best to find time to work on this project again. I'm using it and I love it, otherwise I would never have contributed to it :) Same for testinfra plugin that they're trying to remove from molecule. It's just that it seems pointless to work on that kind of stuff if it's has no chance to work in later molecule update (say molecule 7?).

@dometto it has always been possible to send PR. You only need someone to merge your PRs. Also, please note that, as I said, the problem is that it may end up being a loss of time if molecule support for plugins is killed.

[zhan9san]

@cidrblock @ssbarnea

Thanks for your great work on this project.

Would it be possible to reconsider the users' feedback to keep plugins support in molecule?

As we can see, there are only a few molecule contributors, and there is no exact direction for the new contributors.

I am really sad to see active contributors leave molecule and new contributors don't know what would happen.

molecule plugins have been widely used in molecule ecosystem, and they do provide the convenience for the users.

Recent months, there are some break changes, which introduce some incompatible issues and change the user behavior. As we can see, it make the community not happy.

IIUC, the original thought is that dropping plugins makes molecule slimmer and easy-to-maintain, but the heavy lifting would be thrown to the users. Moreover, the users have to maintain the big playbooks in their own code base. If there are some update, it's difficult to sync the changes to users.

But with plugins, they just need focus the molecule configuration yaml files.

Hope we can work together to make molecule and its plugins help more person.

I am looking forward to your feedback

[cidrblock]

There is no current plan to eliminate support for plugins in Molecule and it will not be reconsidered anytime in the near future.

The goal in Molecule 6 was to make molecule available as a developer preview as part of the Ansible automation platform. Plugin support did not need to be removed and that was a mistake.

The ansible devtools team will primarily focus on using molecule with collections (roles within and testing) and try to promote ansible as a provisioner moving forward. Plugin support will largely be supported by the community, although the devtools team will always be part of that community so the team will always be available.

I hope this clears the air, let me know if not.

Brad

[buckaroogeek]

I spent a couple of working days trying to get the podman plugin working but was unsuccessful. I switched to adopting and adapting the molecule documentation example of using the delegated (default) driver and podman. That worked sufficiently for my purposes. The vagrant plugin just worked out of the box basically using some test cases I developed a few years ago.

[buckaroogeek]

As an update - since the vagrant plugin just worked. I retried the podman plugin and it now works.