jnv/ansible-role-debian-backports

Setup backports repository for Debian and Ubuntu

Debian/Ubuntu Backports with Ansible

Adds backports repository for Debian and Ubuntu.

Note for Debian users: Debian provides backports only for the latest stable version.

Project Status

The project has reached a stable, usable state but the author(s) have ceased all work on it. See Similar Roles section for alternatives.

Usage

Install via Galaxy:

ansible-galaxy install jnv.debian-backports

In your playbook:

- hosts: all
  roles:
    # ...
    - jnv.debian-backports

The role uses apt_repository module which has additional requirements.

You can use default_release option for apt module to install package from backports. For example:

tasks:
  - apt: name=mosh state=present default_release={{ansible_distribution_release}}-backports

ansible_distribution_release variable contains release name, i.e. precise or wheezy.

Variables

• backports_uri: URI of the backports repository; change this if you want to use a particular mirror.
  • Debian: https://deb.debian.org/debian
  • Ubuntu: http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu
• backports_components: Release and components for sources.list
  • Debian: {{ backports_distribution }}-backports backports main contrib non-free
  • Ubuntu: {{ backports_distribution }}-backports main restricted universe multiverse
• backports_state: Whether the backports repository should be used; default 'present', change to 'absent' to disable the role.
• backports_priority_enabled: Whether to enable backports priority (APT pinning); default false.
• backports_priority: Set pin priority for the backports repository; default 100. See more at AptConfiguration page.

Similar Roles

• jgeusebroek.backports
• oefenweb.apt – does much more, but can be also used to enable backports.

Testing

For developing and testing this role Github Actions, Molecule and Vagrant is used. In a local environment environment you can easily test the role with

pip3 install molecule-vagrant ansible-lint yamllint
molecule test

This requires Vagrant to be installed.

ansible-role-debian-backports's Issues

Add Pin-Priority support

By default backports have lower priority but possible to increase it via APT preferences.
Any possibility to add support for it?

https://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu is not available

For Ubuntu Bionic(18.04) Use http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu

Similar / alternative roles?

Comment here with any roles which cover the use case of enabling backports repository in Debian-based systems. I might add them to the list.

Bonus points for roles with compatible API. 😉

Variables cannot be overridden

The variables defined in vars/Debian.yml and vars/Ubuntu.yml apparently have a higher precedence than variables defined in the hosts playbook; seems like a weird Ansible design choice to me. This means that backports_uri cannot be easily overridden.

Creating a file named defaults/main.yml seems most common way to fix this, but I'm not sure how to make this OS-dependant.

Fails on debian 8

Thank you for providing this nice role. Sadly, it fails at the moment when using Debian 8. This wasn't the case in the past. See this example when using your role as dependency
https://travis-ci.org/systemli/ansible-role-needrestart/jobs/489183521

Override of `backports_uri` fails

Thanks for handling of #12, I think the chosen path makes sense.

While trying to override backports_uri, to opt-in to use HTTPS on a Debian system, via group_vars, I ran into a problem: the override doesn't have any effect.

After looking again into the docs, the precedence of include_vars, as used in the code is higher than most of the other mechanisms to provide variables, including group_vars.

Any idea how to deal with this? Is there an alternative we could make use of in this role, to load OS-specific variables, while still keeping the ability to override them?

v0.4.1 missing on ansible-galaxy

The latest version/tag of this role is missing on ansible galaxy

Please let ansible galaxy rescan the github repository, then the version should be listed and used.

Thank you!