donoghuc
commented
5 years ago @DavidS I discussed this with the bolt team and we are planning on only shipping gems/artifacts to support content we bundle with bolt. The list of modules we ship with bolt is https://github.com/puppetlabs/bolt/blob/master/Puppetfile if we were to add a module that required one of these gems we would start shipping it.
The alternate approaches you described seem awesome, but i'm not sure bolt-vanagon is the best project to raise those issues. I'm not sure which project would be best to file issues for (maybe r10k for the first, and bolt for the second).
Use Case
When I use bolt with the Cisco IOS module I need to manually install the net-ssh-telnet gem by running
/opt/puppetlabs/bolt/bin/gem install --user-install net-ssh-telnet. This isn't a great user experience - it causes friction for new users of the module (as reported by early users of the module). It would help on boarding new users if dependent gems are included in the bolt dependencies meaning their installation is done on behalf of customers.Describe the Solution You Would Like
It would be great if the following gems could be included in the bolt package.
Describe Alternatives You've Considered
Even better, but probably a lot more involved would be to add gem dependencies into module metadata, and automatically download/install the required gems.
A different approach could be to allow installing additional gems into a cache directory in the user's home directory.
Additional Context
This was previously https://tickets.puppetlabs.com/browse/BOLT-1377