Ansible Community Training - Instruqt Labs

[Ompragash]

Hi Everyone,

The Ansible Community is thinking about better ways to help onboard new contributors and share Ansible knowledge to community users, as part of this, we are wondering about different ways to deliver documentation as training.

We are happy to launch some interactive training scenarios on the Instruqt: an interactive learning and hands-on virtual IT lab platform to get people used to develop and adopt Ansible.

Currently Available Scenarios:

We suggest the following order for the labs, though each lab is stand alone, so feel to pick what you are interested in.

• Creating your own collection
• Testing A Pull Request Locally
• How to develop a Ansible module
• Adding integration tests to Ansible Collections
• Testing Collections

New scenario ideas are welcome and you can share your ideas in this discussion.

Feedback wanted❤️

• Was it clear what you needed to do
• What did you learn
• Would do you think it could be good to cover in a future course

You can leave your feedback in the comments sections below and guess what! We will randomly select some people that leave feedback to send some special swag to.

Would any of the following scenarios be useful:

• Check out a PR for local testing (how to find the git branch and checkout)
• Creating an empty collection and review structure (add a filter, test, module)
• Writing tests (especially from scratch, e.g. how to prepare environment - "setup_*" roles, etc.)
• Migrate roles to collections

Source code

The source code for the scenarios is available in https://github.com/ansible/instruqt Pull Requests are welcome.

[sdodsley]

I like the new tool, but one comment regarding the cut and paste feature.
When pasting into vim after using :set paste this doesn't always seem to work.
For example, to create a playbook the paste misses the first 2 or 3 characters and you have to exit the file and then re-edit it to add the missing characters.

[gundalow]

@sdodsley That's a good bit of feedback thank you.
I wonder if a different editor would make it easier.

I personally use vim every day, though this discussion makes it clear it's not the right editor for this lab.

[wombelix]

But what's the "right" editor then? I think every cli based editor can be challenging if someone is not used to it and therefore might require some specific work instructions?

[gundalow]

I spoke to some of the folks that put together the Ansible Product Instruqt Labs, they've been using Visual Studio Code (or rather an upstream browser version called "code server")

Not sure if that's overkill for editing a couple of small files, maybe nano or similar would be better?

[Ompragash]

@sdodsley Instruction to copy-paste content in Instruqt UI is mentioned in the course like below:

Note: Turn on `paste` mode in vim by typing `:set paste`, press `i` and then paste the below text to avoid indentation errors.

[wombelix]

I spoke to some of the folks that put together the Ansible Product Instruqt Labs, they've been using Visual Studio Code (or rather an upstream browser version called "code server")

Not sure if that's overkill for editing a couple of small files, maybe nano or similar would be better?

Hard to say, I think everyone will prefer something else. Tried nano during one of the tracks, wasn't really a better copy & paste experience. Not sure if it's technically possible with the used platform, but why not provide a direct SSH Access to the VM, similar as it's done by A Cloud Guru. Could make things easier, people can use their favorite SSH Client or even Visual Studio Remote if they want to.

[Enphuego]

It looked great - it was nice to see where I'm supposed to go for more self training mainly. I assume that the self training will be mostly self explanatory so just an overview is good.

Migrating a role to a collection might be a nice example to show.

[joshcorr]

Created an issue for How to develop a Ansible module #56. Appears that python3.6 is installed in the environment instead of python3.8

[wombelix]

I mentioned the workaround by installing python38 in #57

[Ompragash]

@joshcorr @wombelix Thanks for filing it!

The issue is now resolved as the required Python version (3.8) is made available in the sandbox.

[tarilabs]

(ansible-venv) [devops@shell ~]$ ansible localhost -m example_ns.example_collection.my_test -a "name='hello' new=true"
ERROR: Ansible requires Python 3.9 or newer on the controller. Current version: 3.8.13 (default, Jun 24 2022, 15:27:57) [GCC 8.5.0 20210514 (Red Hat 8.5.0-13)]

[gundalow]

Thanks for reporting this, I've fixed ansible-community-developing-ansible-module, will need to check the other modules

[tarilabs]

@gundalow I realize now, I should have added, that error from this one: https://developers.redhat.com/learn/create-your-own-ansible-module

[wolftales]

I keep running out of time on these labs. My issue (besides being a slow typer) is that cut-n-paste is not an option for my setup:
Firefox 92.0.1
Windows 11

I found an old bug report https://github.com/instruqt/instruqt/issues/2 which appears to still be open

I switched to Edge/Chromium to continue - right-click menu shows Paste as an option now.

[laurent-indermuehle]

Have you tried CTRL + INSERT for copy and SHIFT + INSERT for paste?

[wombelix]

Have you tried CTRL + INSERT for copy and SHIFT + INSERT for paste?

Tried it with Firefox 92 on openSUSE Tumbleweed, both working.

I could select some text in the provided Terminal, copy it by hitting CTRL + INSERT and then Paste it on my local machine with CTRL + V or again in the Instruqt Terminal with SHIFT + INSERT.

Copy the commands from the instructions worked like Chrome by clicking on it, next step was to Paste via SHIFT + INSERT.

With Vivaldi (Chrome based) I could just use CTRL + SHIFT + C and CTRL + SHIFT + V, was a littler "easier" because I'm used to it, but Firefox was ok'ish with your suggestion.

[wolftales]

One other comment on experience of this: The time seemed short. I had to restart this lab series several times because session expired. I realize there needs to be this control. Could there be a "lab timer" added to the page to help avoid session expiring without warning? or perhaps just set expectation that the session is timebound and needs focused attention to complete in a timely manner.

[wombelix]

A timer seem to make sense and is available in the Red Hat System Roles Track, so looks like it's technically possible :)

[jrglynn2]

I personally thought that the Instruqt courses were great!

They were definitely easy to follow along.

I took all 5 of the self-paced labs, which helped me understand more about each of the topics. I have only read about these things before, such as developing a module, or integration tests ... it was cool to walk through the steps of "doing" each of them.

Frankly, I think in answer to the question of "What could be covered in a future course", my answer won't be helpful, because I say "anything and everything" LOL.

I also think some more advanced courses could be created, whether it be around these same 5 topics or others. And maybe in the advanced courses, instead of just copying and pasting, we have to actually code something ourselves, with just general hints in the instructions. Just a thought - I realize that an argument could be made that if the person is at that level, then maybe they should just be trying it out in their own environments.

From the suggestions in the "Would any of the following scenarios be useful" section, I personally would be interested in:

• Writing tests (especially from scratch, e.g. how to prepare environment - "setup_*" roles, etc.)
• Migrate roles to collections

Thanks so much, this was great!

--jrglynn2 (IRC/github)

[laurent-indermuehle]

I enjoy using instruqt. I learn way better this way than by reading the documentation.

Suggestions:

• Provide a link to a repo containing the result of a lab at the end. When the lab finished, everything vanishes. I would love to have a link to a repository containing all the files we worked on during the lab. This is especially useful for stuff that is in a state of transition because I will have to search countless ansible roles or collections to find a related example because not everyone is up to date.

Ideas for new scenarios:

• Using Ansible Execution Environment (For instance, I notice some collections started to ship their own: ee_linux_system_role
• Creating an Ansible Execution Environment

[wombelix]

I completed 6 of the 7 offered Tracks, at least in my instruqt Dashboard there was "Ansible Development Environment" and "Red Hat System Roles" available as well.
Skipped the last one, did those stuff already quite a lot during my RHCE prep some time ago.

Overall I think it's a good platform and a nice approach because I always prefer Hands-On experience during Training Sessions.

• Was it clear what you needed to do

Most of the time yes, there where some minior issues, one due to a wrong Python Version (#57 - already fixed), the other one regarding git (#58). Wasn't a huge problem to solve it on my own but due to the fact that these Tracks are for beginner, I think it's quite important that it works if someone follow exactly the instructions.

• What did you learn

Have already some experience with Ansible and probably doing most of the instruqt tracks after working a lot on my first PR during the Hackathon wasn't the best idea.
What i can say, if I did them before I'm quite sure getting started where definitly easier, so in my opinion the existing tracks are a very good starting point for new contributors (as intended)

• Would do you think it could be good to cover in a future course

The Question is probably what i think could be covered in future courses. Hard to say, the tracks are for beginner from a "Ansible Collection Contribution" perspective, there is a ton of knowledge around expected. On the other side we saw that people already struggled with using vim, don't want to judge, just saying that it might be good to offer tracks with some more basic topics around Ansible, Python, Container and Linux to make it easier. I could also think of some more advanced topics like best practices by re-using existing functions provided by Ansible (e.g. module_utils) instead introducing new Python dependencies.

• Would any of the following scenarios be useful:
  • Check out a PR for local testing (how to find the git branch and checkout)
  • Creating an empty collection and review structure (add a filter, test, module)
  • Writing tests (especially from scratch, e.g. how to prepare environment - "setup_*" roles, etc.)
  • Migrate roles to collections

Yes to all of them.

Further suggestions:

As mentioned in another Post, it might increase the user experience when direct SSH Access to the Lab VMs would be provided. That way People are free to use whatever Tools they want for connecting and editing.
Make content available for reading, independent of the instruqt platform and lab. Personally I love to have stuff well structured in written form, so after going through the Hands-On Labs it would be nice to quickly lookup stuff which was done during the Lab, when trying to adopt it and get the stuff locally up and running. Also when more complicated topics are covered as writing Tests from Scratch or something, it's always the best to have some material or cheatsheet for later reading available.

[Ompragash]

@dvgitit thanks for reporting! We're checking the same issue with the instruqt team and will fix it ASAP!

[Ompragash]

The issue was caused by the underlying gcloud centos image used for this course and it should now work fine! Happy learning:)